Quick Take
- Narration: Steve Blane delivers a measured, respectful performance that holds the weight of Holocaust testimony without sensationalizing it, and handles the book’s later diplomatic passages with equal composure.
- Themes: Holocaust survival and aftermath, faith maintained through catastrophe, Jewish history and the birth of Israel
- Mood: Harrowing then gradually luminous, one of the more emotionally complete survival memoirs in audio form
- Verdict: One of the most compelling Holocaust memoirs available in this format, elevated by Lau’s extraordinary post-war life and his gift for storytelling across seven decades.
I came to Out of the Depths on a Sunday afternoon in the particular frame of mind you need for books like this: quiet, unhurried, willing to stay with difficulty. I had heard of Rabbi Lau in passing, had seen the famous photograph of the small boy liberated from Buchenwald, but had not known his name or his story. By the time Steve Blane reached the account of liberation on April 11, 1945, when Lau was eight years old, I had been listening for two hours and felt the accumulation of everything that preceded it: the loss of his father, the rabbi of Piotrkow, at the hands of the Nazis; the ghetto; the camps; and the extraordinary human chain of older boys, including his teenage brother Naphtali, who kept him alive through those years. The weight of that moment is earned.
Steve Blane’s narration is appropriately restrained. The material is so extreme that any narrator who reaches for additional emotional intensity risks becoming an obstacle between the listener and the testimony itself. Blane trusts Lau’s own prose and storytelling skill, which is considerable. The synopsis notes that Lau is a master storyteller, and this is not promotional language. He has been telling these stories for sixty years, to presidents and popes and schoolchildren, and the narration is shaped by that long practice of communication.
An Eight-Year-Old in Buchenwald and What That Means
The opening section covering Lau’s childhood in Piotrkow and his years as one of the youngest prisoners in the Nazi camp system is where the memoir is most devastating. Lau was born in 1937, which means his entire early childhood was the war. He has no memories of ordinary Jewish life in Poland before the German occupation. What he has instead are fragments: his father’s blessing before the liquidation of the ghetto, the specific mechanics of how his brother hid him and moved him between camps, the names of the men who saved him. That he was liberated alive at eight with a remembered genealogy of twelve generations of rabbis intact, passed to him by his dying father, is one of the most astonishing facts in the book.
The Life That Followed Liberation
The memoir’s second act, covering Lau’s emigration to Mandate Palestine, his upbringing in a new country, his rabbinic formation, and his eventual rise to Chief Rabbi of Israel, is where the book departs from the standard Holocaust memoir structure. Most survivors’ accounts, even very good ones, end or wind down after liberation. Lau’s book has the same amount of life after Buchenwald as before it, which means the reader accompanies him through seven decades of extraordinary engagement with Jewish religious leadership, Israeli political history, and global diplomacy. The accounts of his meetings with Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and multiple US Presidents are handled with Lau’s characteristic storytelling instinct: he always finds the human detail that makes a famous encounter particular.
The 1,000-Year Rabbinical Chain and Its Significance
The biographical fact that Lau comes from an unbroken thousand-year chain of rabbis functions throughout the memoir as a spine rather than a decorative claim. His father’s last act was transmitting that lineage verbally to his young son under conditions that made writing impossible. Lau’s subsequent life, from the displaced child of Buchenwald to Chief Rabbi, is a fulfillment of that transmission, which gives the memoir a structural completeness that feels almost literary while remaining entirely true. One reviewer calls it astounding, listing Elie Wiesel’s Night as a natural companion. The comparison holds: both books ask what endures when almost everything has been taken.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Listen if you have any serious interest in Holocaust testimony, Jewish religious history, Israeli social history, or simply memoirs of extraordinary lives lived at the intersection of catastrophe and reconstruction. The 15-hour runtime is long, but it earns its length through the sheer range of what Lau witnessed and participated in. Skip it only if Holocaust testimony is too emotionally demanding in the current moment. There is no genre-based reason to skip this one.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Out of the Depths compare to other canonical Holocaust memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night?
Lau was a close friend of Wiesel’s and the two shared the experience of Buchenwald’s liberation. Out of the Depths is longer and covers a much broader timespan than Night, which focuses almost entirely on the camp experience. Lau’s book is both a Holocaust memoir and a full life story, which gives it a different emotional arc. Both are essential.
Does Steve Blane’s narration maintain appropriate tone throughout the Holocaust sections and the later diplomatic memoir passages?
Yes. Blane’s restraint is particularly valuable in the camp sections, where the testimony needs no narration enhancement. In the later, lighter passages about encounters with world leaders, he adjusts naturally without creating a jarring tonal shift. The 15-hour performance is consistently measured.
Is the book organized chronologically, or does it move between past and present?
The memoir is largely chronological, following Lau from his early childhood in Piotrkow through liberation and the subsequent decades. There is some retrospective reflection, as is natural in a memoir dictated in later life, but the spine of the narrative moves forward through time.
Is this audiobook appropriate for younger listeners, such as high school students studying the Holocaust?
With appropriate guidance, yes. Lau’s account of Buchenwald is harrowing but not gratuitously graphic. His gift for specific, human-scale detail makes the history accessible rather than overwhelming. Teachers who have used Night or Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz will find Out of the Depths comparably suitable for mature high school audiences.
