Voices from the Holocaust Author:Sylvia Rothchild (Editor) With a foreword by Elie Wiesel. — These are the voices of Holocaust survivors. They were selected from the two hundred and fifty people living in America who were willing to tape their memories of the Holocaust for the William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee. These tapes constitute a vivid, dramatic, moving, and to... more »tally honest re-creation of a human cataclysm we must never forget, for their sake and ours.
These men and women were from all over Europe. They represent every social level and shade of belief in Jewish life. As they recall their lives before, during, and after the Holocaust, we are given a fascinating panorama of the richness and variety of that life in Europe even as the seeds of the Nazi nightmare were being sown on fertile ground. We discover the many different roads that led to survival, some through flight, some through hiding, some through desperate struggle within the confines of the death camps when that nightmare became brutal reality. And we are equally stirred, equally enlightened, as we see how these ordinary yet remarkable human beings built their futures out of displacement and made their peace with the past in the vast unknown that was America.
This book is a history as it was. This book is the human spirit as it can be, both in its most hellish depths and at its most inspiring heights. This book ends a silence born of a suffering that for so long seemed unspeakable. It insures that those who survived the Holocaust do not have the meaning and the message of their experience lost in the onrush of time and the pulsebead of life that goes on.« less