With the catchy title of her book, A Narrow Bridge to Life, Bella Gutterman leads us right into the center of a debate that has not ended since World War II: was Jewish forced labor a means of destruction or rather a chance for survival? Her book deals with the history of more than 100 camps with more than 100,000 inmates, all subordinated to the Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp. Most of these camps have remained unknown. Some existed only a short time, and others had only small numbers of inmates, but almost all left no records, since their archives were housed at the main camp of Gross-Rosen and were destroyed at the end of the war. Gutterman, however, discovered a surprising number of testimonies and diaries as well as documentation collected as evidence for war-crimes trials.

The author first introduces the reader to the general subject of forced labor by focusing on concentration camps in the Third Reich. She then describes the emergence of a regional SS labor program for Jews under Albrecht Schmelt in Silesia in 1940, which was subordinated to the Nazi concentration camp system managed by the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (Economics and Administration Main Office) in 1943/44. While the extensive network of Schmelt-labor camps, located mostly near armament industries, was dismantled and only the most important camps were declared sub-camps of the Auschwitz or Gross-Rosen concentration camps, a fair number of new camps emerged in Silesia and the Sudeten area subordinated to Gross-Rosen up until the end of the war. During the first phase of the establishment of these camps the prisoners mostly came from Silesia proper, but later inmates arrived from the Łódź Ghetto and Plaszow Camp, as well as from Hungary and western Europe. Auschwitz, known as the death camp, supplied the sub-camps with tens of thousands of laborers, most of them Jews selected at the ramp of Birkenau. These Jews had to work for German armament industries and built huge bunkers in the Eulen mountains, as a future hideout for Hitler and as protection for industrial plants against Allied bombings. In 1945, the almost forgotten Gross-Rosen network comprised 160,000 prisoners, probably its highest inmate number (p. 77).

Gutterman provides new information on the establishment and development of the camps, the transports of inmates, and the horrible living conditions of the Jews. As one prisoner wrote, “I have bread—therefore I am” (p. 182). She provides less new information on the actual forced labor: the production, working conditions, and the private companies involved. Gutterman describes in rich detail the ordeal of terror and the struggle for survival of the many Jews in these camps. She includes the often ignored work of Polish and Czech historians, and makes ample use of hitherto unknown personal accounts. Gutterman, for example, devotes one of her chapters to the more than 20,000 women working and living in special women's camps. Her discussion of inmates' cultural, spiritual, and other resistance is also important. For this reviewer, the most interesting chapter concerned the dissolution and liberation of the Gross-Rosen sub-camps. Drawn from a detailed comparative analysis of many eyewitness accounts, Gutterman delivers new facts about the evacuations during winter and early spring 1945, and, moreover, reveals surprising patterns. Such evacuations are usually known as “death marches” because of their huge death toll: thousands of prisoners died of starvation or were murdered by the guards because they were too weak to march farther. Hence, some historians believe that the sole aim of those marches was to kill the last remaining Jews. Gutterman's account points in a different direction, however: the SS marched many of the evacuees, including many foreign laborers and POWs, by foot, but also relocated thousands of them by trains—a forgotten fact. Gutterman clearly shows that the relocation of tens of thousands of inmates in Silesia and the Sudeten area followed central plans and that the prisoners were to be brought to concentration camps within the heart of the Greater German Reich: Bergen-Belsen, Mittelbau, and Mauthausen. Moreover, Gutterman indicates that the high death toll resulted from the chaos of war just ending. There were no food provisions, no prepared shelters on the road during the week-long marches, and the destinations were overwhelmed by too many evacuees. We do not know the overall number of survivors of the Gross-Rosen sub-camps, but 14,000 survivors emerged from fourteen camps alone.

Unfortunately, the publisher did not ask the author to update her Hebrew work of 1996 for this translation. In the past decade, spurred on by the international discussion about compensation for forced labor, German and American historians have learned much about forced labor and the SS-camp system. While Gutterman includes some of the new research—such as Michael Thad Allen's and Jan Erik Schulte's books on the SS economy—in her bibliography, she doesn't integrate them into her analysis. She also does not include a discussion of Karin Orth or Hermann Kaienburg's work on concentration camps, of Christopher Browning and the reviewer's research on Jewish forced labor, or of Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book that claimed labor and death marches were intended only to destroy Jews. A consultation of the recent literature would have facilitated Gutterman's general discussion about the historical place of forced labor within the Nazi system of persecution. In addition, the publisher should have paid attention to the editing of the text, since many spelling errors—especially of German terms, names, places, and authors—mar the reading.

To sum up: Bella Gutterman has delivered a detailed picture of a camp system that was almost forgotten, but has given a less thorough analysis of Jewish forced labor and survival, despite the expectations triggered by the book's title. After reading her account we are left with an ambivalent impression. Many of her facts, as for example the intent of the SS to improve conditions when work was needed, support the thesis that forced labor was a way for Jews to stay alive under terror. Gutterman herself, however, repeatedly sticks with the thesis that in the Third Reich forced labor was intended solely to destroy Jews, as if she doesn't really trust her own account.