Schaumburg native helps give life to Holocaust survival story

After years of hustling for work in Los Angeles, Schaumburg native Brian Brock was thinking about ending his freelance writing career.

Then he met Pierre Berg.

The two worked at the same theater in Beverly Hills. One day, Berg told Brock that he'd written a memoir more than 50 years earlier about the time he spent as a political prisoner in a series of Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

Brock asked to read it. Once he started, he couldn't stop. He asked if he could help Berg turn the manuscript into a nonfiction book.

Seven years later, that book, "Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora" (AMACOM, $24.95), has arrived in stores.

"I couldn't be happier with it," Brock, 48, said. "It took a lot of time to get everything together, but it was worth it."

Brock went to film school at Columbia College Chicago after graduating from Schaumburg High School, then he moved to L.A. to try his hand at screenwriting. He had some success, including a writing credit on the '80s sitcom "Who's the Boss," but the feast-or-famine life of a freelancer was starting to wear on him about the time he met Berg in 2001.

Berg, who grew up in France, was arrested by the Nazis in a horrifying case of "wrong place, wrong time." While still a teenager, Berg visited a classmate only to find Gestapo officers there, searching the friend's house. When the officers found a shortwave radio, which they considered a weapon, they arrested Berg and his friend on the spot. Berg, who isn't Jewish, was labeled a political prisoner and sent to a detention camp in Drancy.

During his internment, which included stints in several other camps, Berg witnessed unimaginable violence and cruelty. He recounts these episodes in "Scheisshaus Luck" in a spare tone laced with dark humor. Many of his stories are harrowing, including several narrow escapes from death (escapes he attributes to the luck referred to in the book's title).

Berg told the complete story to Brock over a two-year period during which they met every day. Brock often assumed the role of interviewer, trying to get Berg to open up and expand on incidents he mentioned only briefly in his original manuscript. Brock said the time he spent working on an ambulance and at UCLA Medical Center helped prepare him for the death and carnage in Berg's stories.

"I don't think I would have been equipped to hear them otherwise," Brock said.

"Scheisshaus Luck" has given new life to Brock's writing career. He's now working on a nonfiction book about a British soldier's experience in a World War II prisoner of war camp.

"I feel lucky that I got to have this experience with Pierre," Brock said. "It's been a rewarding job for me, and I know Pierre's happy to have such an important story available for people, especially younger people, to read."

<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Related links</h2> <ul class="moreWeb"> <li><a href="http://www.amanet.org/books/book.cfm?isbn=9780814412992&page=BookExcerpt">Excerpt from "Scheisshaus Luck"</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>