Bernard Otterman did not write a
Holocaust memoir. After all, he was
only 21/2 when World War II broke out.
He was 8 when he was liberated with
his mother, Dina, in January 1945 by
Russian troops near the Radom con-
centration camp in Poland. He was
too young to have been responsible,
he said, for his own survival.

Mr. Otterman, 65, of Old Westbury,
was the only child survivor of that
Nazi labor camp. "I survived because
of the courage and foresight and work
of my parents," Mr. Otterman said
"To that extent I am like a second-
generation person, here because they
survived. I'm in that funny group of
survivor and also second-generation
child."

To explore the meaning of the Holo-
caust, Mr. Otterman turned to cre-
ative writing. His first collection of
short stories, "Golem of Auschwitz:

Stories" (Slovo-Word Publishing
House, New York, 2001), weave com-
pelling tales that contain glimmers
from his own experience. The stories
are set in the correct historical con-
text, but the characters are imagi-
nary. And to also reach a Russian au-
dience, the book was published in
Russian on one side of the page, Eng-
lish on the other. Though Mr. Otter-
man once spoke Polish, he does not
read Russian.

'"Holocaust and fiction, it's not real-
ly a proper genre," Mr. Otterman
said. "Like me, most of the stories
are really tangentially involved in the
Holocaust."

Mr. Otterman emigrated from Ger-
many in 1951 and earned a Ph.d. in en-
gineering from the State University
of New York at Stony Brook. He was
the chairman of the department of en-
gineering and computer science at
Hofstra University until 1979, then
. joined his parents' real estate busi-
ness. Nearly a decade ago, he began
writing.
"I wrote poetry for the first five or
six years," he said. "Poetry is harder

to write, but it is less of a commit-

ment of your time." But when the
phrase "black grass" popped into his
mind, he was unable to turn the feel-
ings it generated into a poem and
wrote a short story instead. "Black
Grass," an allegory, is the last story
in the book. It won first prize in a
competition at dark College in Wash-
ington State and spurred Mr. Otter-
man to continue with fiction. In 1999,
another of his stories, "Kaddish,"
won first prize in a Nassau Communi-
ty College short story contest.

While his fiction is pungent yet un-
settling, his own experiences are in-
herently compelling. He escaped the
Lodz ghetto with his parents, was
captured and interned. He was left to
his own devices while his parents
worked in a weapons factory. While
the Germans were dismantling the
Radom camp in June 1944, they held a
"final selection," Mr. Otterman re-
called. Men were put on one side;

women and children on the other and
marched to a train bound for Ausch-
witz.

When a Nazi guard turned his head,
Mr. Otterman and his mother ducked
behind a bush. "It was very iffy," Mr.
Otterman recalled. "The actual suc-
cess of the escape, you would have to
call it a miracle. It wasn't a planned
thing." His father, David, boarded the
train. He was later liberated from a
satellite camp near Dachau.

Mr. Otterman said the experience
of writing about the Holocaust made
him feel sad. He is at peace with his
own experiences. But he wants to en-
sure that the Holocaust not be forgot-
ten.

"I write about it because I want to
know, if I had been an adult during
those periods of time, how would I
have managed?" he said. "How
would I have done things? By writing
about it, I sort of placed myself back
in time, not as a child, but as an adult
and see how I would have done."   •