An examination of the recorded memoirs of 50 Holocaust survivors. Patterson draws on the sacred texts of Jewish tradition and the philosophy of Fackenheim and Levinas. He discusses the recovery of tradition, recovery seen as recovery from illness, and recovery as a process which has no resolution.

A collection of poems written in Jewish ghettos, way stations, death camps and forests under the nightmarish circumstances of the Holocaust.

The personal story of a teenage boy in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. It begins with his deportation in 1942 to the Belgium concentration camp of Breendonk at the age of 16 and follows his movements through a series of camps until 1945, concluding with the Auschwitz death march and his return to Belgium.

When World War II erupted in Europe, Konrad Charmatz was a prospering businessman in Sosnowiec, Poland, a loving son, and an aspiring poet. For the next seven years he witnessed the Holocaust as it destroyed his family, his country and his culture. In this study of suffering and survival, he gives his own personal account of the Warsaw ghetto, the death chambers at Auschwitz, the transport trains, the slave labour camps of Dachau, and the liberation. And from the perspective of the renowned journalist he later became, he also describes how the Holocaust was carried out, not only at the level...

Compelling recollections of a Jewish boy in a prewar Polish village, of his incredible scramble to survive the Holocaust, and of his adventures in America. Told with the inimitable flair of a born storyteller, these stories recall the lost world of small-town Polish Jewry before the Holocaust and the subsequent odyssey of one boy's struggle to stay alive in the face of catastrophe. Brimming with the authenticity and humanity of personal experience, these memoirs are at once persuasive, moving, and universal in appeal. Packed with rarely divulged details of daily life during the Holocaust, the...

The story of how three young Polish Jewish women attempt to resurrect their lives in the bitter aftermath of World War II. After years in a concentration camp, their search for freedom bears fruit in the promise of a Jewish homeland. But pioneering Israel means new hardships.

A unique personal account of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust and of a young man's determination to prevail in the face of utter catastrophe. In this unusual memoir, Edward Stankiewicz stirringly recalls his youth as a Polish Jew beginning with prewar Warsaw through to the Nazi invasion. Life on the run lands Stankiewicz in Soviet-occupied. Lwow where in time he joins the Lwow Literary Club. A friend of Jewish, Yiddish, Polish, and Soviet poets and writers, he offers rare insights into wartime Eastern European intellectual life. After the German occupation of Lwow, in the...

Unlike many Holocaust books, which deal primarily with the concentration camps, this book focuses on Jewish life before Jews lost their autonomy and fell totally under Nazi power. These essays concern various aspects of Jewish daily life and governance, such as the Judenrat, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, religious life, housing, death, smuggling, art, and the struggle for survival while under siege by the Nazi regime. Written by survivors of the ghettos throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, this collection contains historical and cultural articles by prominent scholars, an essay on...

Alan Scott Haft provides the first-hand testimony of his father, Harry Haft, a holocaust victim with a singular story of endurance, desperation, and unrequited love. Harry Haft was a sixteen-year-old Polish Jew when he entered a concentration camp in 1944. Forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle bouts for the perverse entertainment of SS officers, Harry quickly learned that his own survival depended on his ability to fight and win. Haft details the inhumanity of the "sport" in which he must perform in brutal contests for the officers. Ultimately escaping the camp, Haft's experience left...

A first-hand account that gives special attention to the author's experience among pre-dominantly non-Jewish partisans in Soviet Russia, where he confronted anti-Semitism while facing a common enemy. In this candid memoir, Harold Zissman examines Jewish existence in prewar and wartime Poland. Born into an observant family, he begins by recalling his youth in the Polish town of Ostrow-Mazowieck, near the German border. It is the 1930s, a time of childhood nostalgia darkened by ominous anti-Semitic uprisings and government indifference. In lean and concise prose, Zissman relives the German...