After the Holocaust - Hardcover

Greenfeld, Howard

3.59

93 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688177522 ISBN 13: 9780688177522

Publisher: Greenwillow Books, 2001

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With excerpts from personal interviews and more than sixty-five of the survivors' own black-and-white photographs as well as archival pictures, Howard Greenfeld's landmark book presents an important chapter in history: the story of young men and women after the Holocaust.

Ann, George, Civia, Alicia, Akiva, Judith, Larry, and Tonia. In many ways, these young people are just like all of us. But their stories are extraordinary, because they lived through one of the unspeakable tragedies in human history -- the Holocaust of World War II.

On May 8, 1945, when the Allies announced the unconditional surrender of Germany, the war in Europe was over. But the stories of these eight young survivors were far from over. Often adrift and alone, they found themselves fighting to survive in a world that didn't always want them and didn't know where they belonged.

In their own words, these Holocaust survivors describe their journeys after liberation, from hiding places and concentration camps through displaced persons camps, illicit border crossings, emigration, and beyond.

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About the Author:

Howard Greenfeld grew up in New York City; graduated from Columbia University; and lived in Rome, Florence, and Camaiore, Italy; and in Paris, France. He wrote twenty books for young adults, including biographies of Marc Chagall, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Impressionist painters. He founded the Orion Press to publish English-language translations of European writers and has translated several literary works himself from both French and Italian. He wrote the definitive book on publishing for young readers, Books: From Writer to Reader, a text which has also been used in college courses.

He wrote two critically acclaimed books about the Holocaust. The first, The Hidden Children, was described by The Horn Book in a starred review as "inspiring, and often troubling, reading . . . A lovely, important book about heroism and survival." The second, After the Holocaust, uses excerpts from personal interviews and archival photographs to explore the experiences of young survivors in the wake of World War II.

Howard Greenfeld died in 2006.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Gr. 6-12. Greenfeld's The Hidden Children (1993) is a classic account of the children who survived in hiding from the Nazis in Europe. This book uses a similar approach to tell the story of what happened to young Holocaust survivors after the war. Greenfeld weaves the personal stories (based on his interviews with eight Jewish survivors now living in the U.S.) with his own commentary and a general history of the time. The readable, slightly oversize design features lots of black-and-white photographs, news photos, and family snapshots that capture what was lost. Occasional sidebars fill in the history, including one on U.S. immigration quotas in 1945 that denied entry to refugees. The truth of the individual voices gives the history immediacy. Many Jews faced anti-Semitism after the war, but what was it like for a teen to return home and knock on the door, only to be chased away by people who had grabbed the place when the young person's family was sent to the camps? What did young orphans do in the displaced-persons' camps, waiting for months for a country to take them in? Greenfeld has deliberately chosen a wide range of survivors who were young at the time of liberation, from several different countries and with a variety of war experiences. Several nearly died in the camps, a few had been in safe hiding places. Some were hungry for education after the war; some were wild for a good time. Some want to forget; some cannot. There's no sentimentality; one survivor is still haunted by the horrific revenge some ex-prisoners took on their guards. Greenfeld quotes Gabrielle Schiff, who talks about what she witnessed as a social worker in the DP camps: "At the risk of destroying a well-known cliche, I affirm that suffering does not make people any better; it often brings out the worst in them." There is no better book to answer the Holocaust deniers. As Greenfield writes, the post-Holocaust experiences are actually a continuation of the Holocaust itself, not a postscript. Hazel Rochman
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