Accident of Fate

Reviews / Votes

Rochlitzs memory is fresh...and while his account benefits from knowledge acquired later, it is primarily the view of a young person living through the most difficult period of European history.... [A] well-written and humane memoir which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the history of Europe. The book is well illustrated with personal photos and documents and well-drawn maps. Vesna Domany Hardy, Jewish Renaissance Jewish Renaissance September 2011-10-25 ``With Accident of Fate we have a first-hand record of the much darker period between 1938 and 1945 which, as Rochlitz insists, he survived by pure chance. And very convincingly, after one discovers that over these few years Rochlitz was imprisoned several times, forced to dig mass graves at the Jasenovac death camp and fought alongside fugitive Partisans. It is not, however, Rochlitz's tribulations that distinguish this book, but his sombre observations and unbiased perspective. As a foreign Jew in Yugoslavia, Rochlitz was an outsider, but being young, having learnt the language and being in possession of an amiable character, Imre easily became the Yugoslav Mirko. This peculiar double-sidedness gives Rochlitz's memoir invaluable significance for the historiography of Yugoslavia's wartime fratricide.... The value of Imre Rochlit'z memoir is that it does not attempt to conceal the ordinary. Thus we find rare and rather unpleasant descriptions of how biological needs were met in death transports and camps, or of matters of hygiene during prolonged guerilla resistance. There are also vivid descriptions and scrutiny of the Partisans' sex lives or lack thereof, which remains a taboo for Yugoslav veterans and a controversial subject in historiography to this day. Equally valuable are Rochlitz's stories of how food was procured and provisioned, as well as everyday pastimes and entertainment in zones of war. Finally, he describes how the Partisans perceived the Jews, how they treated dissent and Otherness, and how they navigated between allies and enemies to emerge as sole victors, although at a high price.... Rochlitz proves himself to be a shrewd, incisive and very critical observer.... [In] this book which so impresses with its thoroughness of historic detail, its meticulous research and contextualization, illustrated with authentic photographs, and reprints of original documents and maps. This is a book both for scholars and for the general reader, but especially for young readers who find the horrors of the Holocaust to hard to imagine. While gruff at times, Rochlitz's recollections are never ill-hearted. Behind his criticisms we find a deep, unchallenged humanity and an inspiring passion for life.'' -- Bojan Aleksov -- SEER, 91, 2, April 2013 ``Imre Rochlitz's book is a memoir of his unique coming of age as a Jewish teenager first in Austria until 1938, and then in Croatia before and during World War II. It manages to combine several books' worth of material in barely two hundred pages. It is simultaneously a Holocaust memoir, a testimony about the Yugoslav Partisan movement from one of its participants, and a lucid reflection on the past by an amateur historian.... Interspersed with the text are the author's comments about the postwar fates of some of the people mentioned, as well as reproductions of wartime documents he found in various archives, and even a bit of his 1995 interview with Fitzroy Maclean, former head of the Allied Mission to Yugoslavia. More interesting for the professional historian are Rochlitz's thought-provoking and occasionally provocative comments about the survivor's burden of memory, Holocaust research, and the very nature of survival. Though he is adamant that he survived by pure chance, not by courage or wits or the intervention of a higher power, the ambiguous title of the book is reflected in the multiple layers of memory and narrative interpretation it contains.'' -- Mirna Zakic, Ohio University -- Austrian History Yearbook, 43, 2012 ``Imre Rochlitz's book is enlightening and relevant. Sparse and understated, it is all the more powerful and emotionally moving. The author suffered many devastating personal losses during the war, and retains to this day a profound sorrow about mishaps and mistakes, bad timing, and sheer bad luck. He never expresses self-pity, but writes of what he might have done better and what he learned from his experiences. His readers acquire a deep respect for his courage and humanity under the most horrifying of circumstances. Accident of Fate is one of the best Holocaust memoirs I have read in a long time.'' -- Susan Zuccotti, author of The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescueand Survival and Under His Very Windows: The Vatican andthe Holocaust in Italy ``Rochlitz intersperses his taut, lively narrative with both textual and visual documentary material.... Here too he interjects his own later discoveries or encounters with characters from the main story. The documents come from private and general archival sources, all of which are cited in the acknowledgements at the end. The book also includes a helpful glossary of names and places, an index, a short bibliography of works in English for the general reader, and a list of the some sixty Allied airmen and POWs whom the young Imre encountered during the war in Yugoslavia.... American readers will appreciate the book's illumination of the complex Yugoslav political landscape as battleground between the Allied and the Axis powers, and among the different ethnic groups. The young Rochlitz himself, fighting with the Yugoslav partisans and struggling to negotiate anti-Semitic, anti-German, and anti-Hungarian (since at that point the Hungarians were allied with the Germans) sentiment, claimed to be a Slovene, a group anot particularly hated by either the Serbs or the Croats, who were busy hating each othera.'' -- Cecile Cazort Zorach, Franklin and Marshall College -- Yearbook of German-American Studies, Volume 46, 2011