Witness: Voices from the Holocaust - Hardcover

Greene, Joshua M.; Kumar, Shiva

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684865254 ISBN 13: 9780684865256

Publisher: Free Press, 2000

Synopsis

"When the sun came up, it was not like the sun -- I swear to you! It was not bright. It was always red to me; it was always black to me. It never said, never, never was life to me. It was destruction! The sun was never beautiful." -- Edith P., survivor of Auschwitz and Salzwedel concentration camps

"I was born on the train and I died on the train. I actually didn't know why I was there on the train and what was happening to us. I wasn't even alive. I wasn't there." -- Bessie K., age 19, deported 1943

"What I felt when the liberation came? That I am alone in the whole world....I had no desire to live. I had no place to go. I had nobody to talk to. I was just simply lost, without words." -- Hanna F., sole survivor of her family of five

Fifty-five years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust continues to cast a dark shadow. Historians, theologians, philosophers, and others have tried to explain how and why the Holocaust occurred, but their theories often give short shrift to the personal accounts of the individuals involved. For the past twenty years, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University has sought to preserve the human side of this inhuman era by videotaping testimonies from those who lived through the Nazi era, a project that has led to an acclaimed documentary film and this extraordinary book. As the noted Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer writes in his foreword, "Without survivor testimony, the human dimension of the catastrophe would remain a subject of speculation. The voices of the victimized provide us with an intimate glimpse of daily existence [and] furnish a version of the atrocity that the killers chose not to preserve."

In Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar weave a single and compelling narrative from the first-person accounts of twenty-seven witnesses, including Jews, Gentiles, Americans, a member of the Hitler Youth, a Jesuit priest, resistance fighters, and child survivors. They tell stories of life under the Nazis, in the ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps, and they recount the mixed emotions that accompanied liberation and persisted in the years following the Holocaust. Their experiences reveal what it is like to live in a world where there were no clear moral options, and most choices were between bad and worse; even for those who survived, there were no happy endings. The vivid and detailed memories of these witnesses testify to the continuing impact of this human catastrophe, and their impassioned words lend immediacy to events that resonate to this day.

About this title

About the Author

Joshua M. Greene (left) produces books and films of personal narrative. His award-winning films have aired on PBS, HBO, the Disney Channel, and stations in twenty countries. He lives in Old Westbury, New York.

Reviews

Textbooks and historical accounts can provide a broad view of the Holocaust, but nothing can come close to the power of the testimony of those who were there. As Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer writes in his introduction to this collage of first-hand accounts, "Without survivor testimony, the human dimension of the catastrophe would remain a subject of speculation." For more than two decades, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University has been videotaping the oral histories of Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses. This extraordinary project has resulted in a documentary that will air on PBS in April and in this companion book. Editors Greene, a filmmaker, and Kumar, a scholar specializing in ethics and morality in global TV production, have woven together the testimonies of 27 individuals into an unforgettable narrative of the Holocaust: starting with pre-WWII Jewish life, they go on to describe the war's outbreak, ghettos, resistance and hiding, death camps, death marches, liberation and life after the Holocaust. Through careful selection and sequencing, the editors have succeeded in their goal: "to edit without editorializing." These painfully sad testimonies speak for themselves, providing the horrific details of people's experiences. The common link among these speakers is the eternal scars they bear. One survivor concludes his remarks with the haunting words: "I can't tell you everything in an interview. I couldn't even describe one day in the ghetto. I don't want to live with that pain, but it's there. It's there. It forms its own entity and it surfaces whenever it wants to." These voices bring us a step closer to comprehending the lasting anguish of the Nazi genocide. Photos. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A companion volume to both a PBS documentary (scheduled to air in April 2000) and Yale's Fortunoff Archive (www. library.yale.edu/testimonies), this print compilation of the remembrances of 27 Holocaust witnesses is an excellent addition to the literature. The "voices" here range from the Jewish experience to that of non-Jews, American POWs, and resistance fighters. Editors Greene, an award-winning film producer, and Kumar, who teaches graduate seminars on ethics and morality, have wisely chosen to group the narratives chronologically and to edit them only minimally. The results are cohesive and compelling firsthand stories that begin in the 1930s and end with the still very painful memories of today. Many of the individuals in Witness lay bare their emotions, having never before discussed their experiences; hence, this work contrasts with other Holocaust memoirs in which the writers have had time for introspection and editing. Recommended for public and academic library Holocaust collections.
-Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684865254
• ISBN 13: 9780684865256
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304