Stay Alive

“Buruma, professor at Bard College and author of Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013), has a personal interest in the subject of his latest book: His father spent two years in Berlin, compelled to join 400,000 foreign factory workers, poorly fed and housed but paid a small salary. Buruma draws on a rich source of material, including letters and diaries, enriching these with interviews with wartime eyewitnesses, now in their 90s . . . Buruma describes heroic Berliners who sheltered Jews, despite the terrible danger, but heroism is rare, and most Germans, even sympathizers, refused . . . Richly complex, if often painful.” —Kirkus

“[A] far-reaching and masterly work . . . Drawing on letters, interviews, and archival research, this penetrating look into the lives and wartime experiences of Berliners will add a needed dimension to public and academic library collections.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Ian Buruma brings to life Berlin during World War II so vividly that you can imagine yourself blithely strolling the streets of the city or hunkering down in the bomb shelters. Buruma tapped a wealth of sources—not only published memoirs, but first-hand interviews with elderly survivors and a cache of letters stored in a tin written by Buruma’s own father, a forced laborer in Berlin during the war. The beauty of the book is Buruma’s nuanced writing about the Germans who weighed resistance against the imperative to stay alive, and those who simply became cogs in Hitler’s murderous regime. As the author of the definitive book about post-Germany and Japan, The Wages of Guilt, Buruma is uniquely qualified to take on these still-relevant questions of morality.” —Barbara Demick, author of Daughters of the Bamboo Grove and Eat the Buddha

“In wartime Berlin it was possible to find every form of human behavior, from conformity and cruelty to bravery and indifference. Using his father’s memories and letters as well as a wide range of other sources, Ian Buruma has composed a brilliant account of what it felt like to be there. Stay Alive is a beautifully written account of a city under military and moral siege.” —Professor Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History

“Ian Buruma, renowned for his enduring work about German and Japanese guilt and complicity during World War II, now adds a searing chronicle of wartime Berlin, told in part through the experience of his own Dutch father there. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Stay Alive is particularly haunting in showing how ordinary Germans conformed with Nazism and the persecution and deportation of their Jewish neighbors. It makes a chilling warning of how people can acquiesce and look away from the worst realities.” —Gary Bass, author of Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“An exceptional excursion into the multiple, contradictory lives, voices and dilemmas of Berlin’s inhabitants during the Nazi war years, almost hallucinatory in its incessant matter-of-factness. By providing a compelling and compulsive immersion into that crucial period of history, Buruma also eloquently reminds us of how, in our own time, the temptation to look away from persecution and injustice has terrifying consequences.” —Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum