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"In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon ...

"In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation--the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease." After the liberation of the Lodz Ghetto, his notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe. The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. Off mountain climbing and studying in southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady enthusiasm to experience life, learn languages, and read great literature. He returns home under the quickly gathering clouds of war. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are soon forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world. With intimate, undefended prose, the diary's young author begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make reason out of a world gone mad; coping with the plagues of death and deportation. Repeatedly he rallies himself against fear and pessimism, fighting the cold, disease, and exhaustion which finally consume him. Physical pain and emotional woe hold him constantly at the edge of endurance. Hunger tears Dawid's family apart, turning his father into a thief who steals bread from his wife and children. The wonder of the diary is that every bit of hardship yields wisdom from Dawid's remarkable intellect. Reading it, you become a prisoner with him in the ghetto, and with discomfiting intimacy you begin to experience the incredible process by which the vast majority of the Jews of Europe were annihilated in World War II. Significantly, the youth has no doubt about the consequence of deportation out of the ghetto: "Deportation into lard," he calls it. A committed communist and the unit leader of an underground organization, he crusades for more food for the ghetto's school children. But when invited to pledge his life to a suicide resistance squad, he writes that he cannot become a "professional revolutionary." He owes his strength and life to the care of his family.

Everyone knows the name of Anne Frank but few people remember anything about the people who sheltered her. Who were the rescuers and what motivated them to risk their lives for persecuted Jews? Clearly such people deserve to be remembered and honored. And clearly an understanding of their ...

Everyone knows the name of Anne Frank but few people remember anything about the people who sheltered her. Who were the rescuers and what motivated them to risk their lives for persecuted Jews? Clearly such people deserve to be remembered and honored. And clearly an understanding of their motivations may help us cultivate such behavior in our own day. This book focuses on such "righteous Christians." Tec, herself a Holocaust survivor helped by Christians, vividly recreates through hundreds of cases what it was like to pass and hide among Christians and what it was like to rescue Jews. Limiting her compass to Poland, where anti-Semitism was particularly extreme, the author interviewed dozens of people now living in many lands and also examined a vast array of published accounts and unpublished testimonies yielding case histories of over 500 Polish helpers. As the book preserves for posterity the heroism of such people as Celka, the impoverished governess, and her paralyzed father, who took into their one-room apartment a Jewish child, refused to baptize her without her family's permission, and even fed her before they themselves ate, or Dr. Felix Kabus, who developed and frequently performed an operation that camouflaged circumcision, or the famous anti-Semitic author who wrote publicly about what was happening to the Jews, the book fills a significant gap in our knowledge of the Holocaust. Considering the influence of such factors as class, education, religion, political persuasion, and friendship between the victims and rescuers, Tec finds only two common characteristics among this incredibly diverse group: an overpowering need to help others under any circumstances and an intense individualism. The rescuers were "individuals who did not rely on the opinions of others." Tec writes. About the Author: Nechama Tec, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connectucut, is also the author of Dry Tears.

Daniel Bennahmias was hardly more than a boy when he and his family were herded onto the death train that would transport them from their home in Greece to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, Birkenau. His parents were exterminated immediately upon arrival, but Danny managed to survive ...

Daniel Bennahmias was hardly more than a boy when he and his family were herded onto the death train that would transport them from their home in Greece to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, Birkenau. His parents were exterminated immediately upon arrival, but Danny managed to survive. Because of his strength, the youthful prisoner was recruited by the Germans to become a member of a Sonderkommando unit, its horrendous job being to disentangle the bodies of the Jews put to death in the gas chambers in preparation for their subsequent cremation. Rebecca Fromer traces the plight of her friend through every inconceivable, unspeakable ordeal: the bewildering roundup of Greek Jews; the non-familiar, but no more understandable, atrocities of their German captors; Danny's numbed acceptance of his gruesome assignment as a trade-off for life itself, if only as a temporary measure; an abortive prison rebellion and the resulting punishment; one final freezing march from Auschwitz to Ebensee, as Allied troops approached; and, at last, rescue by the American soldiers and the tentative readmittance to civilization, changed forever. Daniel Bennahmias is one of the few persons in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau to have survived the war, and the recounting of his experiences reveals details heretofore unknown about the "inner life" of the Nazi factories of death. Bennahmias supplies missing elements in the story of the revolt of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau, the dismantling of the crematoria, the death march and its aftermath, including the miraculous experience of liberation by the Allies. This is the tragic story of Daniel Bennahmias, a Greek Jew of Italian citizenship, a young manof science and intellect, music and art, who had a family, a culture, and a life that was all but obliterated. He is not a number, but he has become a statistic; he is not a thing, even though he became an object beneath sco

Was there a German-Jewish dialogue? This seemingly innocent question was silenced by the Holocaust. Since then, it is out of the question to take comfortable refuge to a distant past when Mendelssohn and Lessing started this dialogue. Adorno/Horkheimer, Arendt, and above all Scholem have repeatedly ...

Was there a German-Jewish dialogue? This seemingly innocent question was silenced by the Holocaust. Since then, it is out of the question to take comfortable refuge to a distant past when Mendelssohn and Lessing started this dialogue. Adorno/Horkheimer, Arendt, and above all Scholem have repeatedly pointed out, how the noble promises of the Enlightenment were perverted, which led to a complete failure of Jewish emancipation in Germany. It is against this backdrop of warning posts that we dare to return to an important chapter of Jewish culture in Germany. This project should not be seen, however, as an attempt to idealize the past or to harmonize the present, but as a plea for a new dialogue between Germans and Jews about their common past.