A Hebraic Obsession by Mort Laitner

Valerie Penny ♦ November 4, 2014 ♦ Leave a comment

There was a lot of discussion about A Hebraic Obsession by Mort Laitner on Linked In. It seemed such a remarkable tale that I wanted to read it as soon as I could. I ordered it on Amazon, although I try not to use that company too often. I prefer to buy things in the village, if I can. However, the only way I could get this book was to order it and have it sent to me from the USA.

The book took weeks to arrive, so long that I thought it had been lost. However, when it did arrive, I was not disappointed. This is a unique and important book. It tells Mort’s father’s story. Wolf Laitner was born in Poland. He was a medical doctor, but that is not the half of it. He must have been a truly remarkable man. Mort claims that his father’s only mistake was not to believe that Adolph Hitler would invade Poland.

His father paid dearly for that belief. The book starts when Mort was a boy of only 10 years old. He was hiding at the top of the staircase in his home. He was listening to he father tell his own harrowing story to his friends. Many of them bore the numbers tattooed on to their wrists by the Nazis during World War II. He lived through the hell on earth that was Auschwitz. He was in the lines to go into the gas chamber when he was called out from the line and reprieved. He kept what he called “Holocaust tapes”: these were his own recorded memories. Mort only had access to these after his father’s death.

I would not want to detract from the story by attempting to offer a synopsis here. Suffice to say the story needs to be read. Parts of it tell of misery and cruelty beyond imagination. Man’s inhumanity to his fellow man is laid bare in the author’s inimitable style.

The author is an attorney at law, a professor of Law and Ethics at Barry University in Miami, Florida, and at Florida International University an American public research university in Greater Miami, Florida, in the United States, with its main campus in University Park in Miami-Dade County. He lives with his family in Southern Florida.

I highly recommend A Hebraic Obsession, although much of it is not an easy read.