A Jewish haven in Nazi Berlin

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REFUGE IN HELL: HOW BERLIN'S JEWISH HOSPITAL OUTLASTED THE NAZIS

By Daniel B. Silver

Houghton Mifflin, $24, 336 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY CORINNA LOTHAR

It defies credence, but when Russian troops marched into Berlin on April 24, 1945, they found 800 Jews alive and well in Berlin's Jewish hospital. The inhabitants were doctors, nurses and patients. The hospital and the Jewish cemetery at Weissensee were the sole Jewish facilities left in the city that Joseph Goebbels had declared "Judenrein" -- cleansed of Jews -- in 1943.

How this isolated institution and its staff served, with extraordinary dedication, and managed to survive despite the constant terrible dread of deportation, or execution for the slightest infringement of rule or Nazi whim, is the subject of "Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis." It's a fascinating and highly readable book by Daniel B. Silver, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Silver learned of the hospital quite by accident at a Washington dinner party and he spent 20 years researching its history. His research included not only earlier publications on the Holocaust, but published and unpublished memoirs of people who were in the hospital during the war years, unpublished archival materials and, most pertinently, interviews with Jewish survivors.