On Burning Ground: A Son's Memoir
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On Burning Ground: A Son's Memoir Overview
On Burning Ground is the tale of one desperate and brilliant man's ultimate choice: at the eve of the Nazi purging of Poland, to disguise his Jewish origin and pose first as a Christian, then to join the Nazi SS. Living in constant fear, Michael Skakun's father, Joseph, not only assumed a dangerous array of identities in order to survive, but subsequently compromised his very spirit. On Burning Ground is a brave and revelatory tale of a son's father who risked it all, and through his amazing odyssey, was keenly aware of the price of such deceits.
On Burning Ground: A Son's Memoir Specifications
The "burning ground" of the title is not just the blasted landscape of Holocaust-era Europe but also the existential anguish of its protagonist, rabbinical student Joseph Skakun, so seared by the evils he has witnessed that at one desperate moment suicide seems the only possible response. Joseph was one of very few Jews in his northern Polish village to escape extermination at the end of 1941, and his odyssey of survival took him into the very "maw of the beast." Assuming the identity of a Muslim Tatar (to account for his circumcision), he traveled to Germany as a foreign laborer. Later, fleeing the suspicions of a fellow worker, he enlisted in the Waffen SS, an act of crushing ethical ambiguity for a young man steeped in the Jewish tradition of Mussar, which stressed moral self-examination. After the war, consumed by the need to convey and come to grips with his experiences, Joseph made a confidant of his son, the author of this galvanizing biography and memoir. Retelling his father's story, Michael Skakun pens a drama of biblical breadth and Dostoyevskian depth, scanting neither the visceral horror of his father's ordeal nor the resourcefulness and resolve that enabled Joseph to endure. --Wendy Smith
