Word: ben
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...week as two street derelicts, they seemed to bring everything in their ragtag baggage but a violin and a cup. Roberts, facing the amputation of both feet because her frozen toes had become gangrenous, was forced into a literally incredible choice between dismemberment, Coco and death that not even Ben Casey could have treated successfully...
Such elaborate ceremonies, think some observers, reflect the younger generation's rebellion against traditional reserve and modesty. The oldsters, however, recalling postwar poverty, enjoy flaunting their yen. Notes Tokyoite Ben Tsuchiya, who assisted at his brother's recent wedding: "If it is beautifully done, the wedding makes the parents look good, and can even help in business because it impresses people...
Pisar's recollections of the ghetto remain vivid. It was here; on his thirteenth birthday, that he was bar mitzvahed in a shabby synagogue in full sight of the pacing Nazi guards. It was here that he first met Ben, the lifelong friend who accompanied him through the camps and with whom he made a solemn pact to survive. And it was here that his father kissed the family goodbye and left home for the last time. A few months later, the ghetto was razed and those who survived were put on a train for the camps...
Pisar's most dramatic brush with death came roughly a year later, after he, Ben and "several hundred others who had stubbornly refused to die" had been transported to Auschwitz. One morning, Pisar's number was called and he and his group were placed in a halfway barrack to have their numbers checked off as they waited their turn: "We stand closely packed in a dread silence." Pisar writes, "the faces around me flushed with the rage of helplessness, or some crazed hope of last-minute deliverance, or the hallucinatory peace of the imminence of death. At the back...
...Spring of 1945, as the Allies closed in around Germany, Pisar and his two close friends--Ben and Niko, "the wild Dutchman"--had been sent to the West to dig up body pits to hide evidence. As they were being marched back to Dachau with a column of prisoners they decided to make a run for it and dashed for the woods. Of the 14 who broke from the column, nine were shot. Ben. Niko and Pisar escaped...