To No Man's Glory: A Child's Journey From Holocaust To Healing

By Victoria Benson and Vincent Benson

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967656605
• ISBN13: 9780967656601
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Silver Dove Publishing Co.
• Length: 201 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Very highly recommended

So much has been written about surviving the Holocaust, that it takes a remarkable voice and a remarkable story to present fresh insight into growing up during the Holocaust years. However, Vincent Benson's story has been captured by his wife's words in a haunting, vivid memoir. Together, the Bensons have created a tale that blends memory with recorded history into a novel that is a must read.When German soldiers invaded Latvia, Vincent Benson, then known as Arturs Lejnieks, was a three-year-old orphan. As tanks advanced on the orphanage, Auntie (the only mother Vincent would ever know took him by the hand and carried him in her arms as they fled through tunnels beneath the orphanage to the forest outside the city. From 1941 to 1945 they lived in the forest, taking shelter in ditches during air raids, skirting corpse-filled fields, even surviving blizzard conditions. Although the child's innocence was ripped from him by violence and death, Vincent still found comfort and love with Auntie, and for a while his Dog, and his friend. Yet despite the horrible conditions, both Vincent and Auntie survived bombings, starvation, and capture.Together Vincent and Auntie endured a children's prison camp and escaped a firing squad. When the war ended, however, the liberating British army managed to do what the Germans could not. They forced separation. Vincent was sent to the United States of America to be adopted, while Auntie was sent to England. Although she even married a British soldier to establish a home for the child, the British government did not see fit to give her custody of Vincent.Coming to America was not the idealistic cowboy heaven promised by the American movies. Vincent could not endure the skyscrapers of New York and was eventually placed on a farm in the Midwest. But even there he received many challenges, and it was only his eventual maturity and growing faith that saved the young man from enduring despair.Written with self-honesty and revealing the pain of a child who was never able to be a child, TO NO MAN'S GLORY will not only touch the heart, but also enlighten the mind. The novel demonstrates the strength of human spirit and the will to survive in powerful, vivid language, yet does not dwell on the horror to the point that the novel becomes painful to read. A difficult balance, indeed, to find and maintain. This reviewer was profoundly touched by TO NO MAN'S GLORY, and heartily recommends it.