It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival

Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.
 
Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.  

About the Author

Rabbi Leon Thorne was born in Schodnica, near Drohobycz, the area of Eastern Galicia he describes vividly in It Will Yet Be Heard. He was ordained a rabbi at the age of 19, continued his religious studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, and earned a Ph.D. at Wuerzburg in philosophy and history. He survived the Holocaust and became a chaplain in the Polish army upon liberation in 1944. Rabbi Thorne emigrated to the United States in 1948, and in 1961, published the first part of his memoir as Out of the Ashes. Now newly introduced, expanded, and with a previously unpublished second half, It Will Yet Be Heard offers rare insight into the Holocaust and its aftermath in Poland.

About Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. His review of Out of the Ashes appeared in 1961, and appears here in English for the first time.

About the Editor

Daniel H. Magilow is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has published four books, including In Her Father’s Eyes: A Childhood Extinguished by the Holocaust, also published by Rutgers. In 2005-2006, he was the Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

About the Translator

Marc Caplan is a scholar of Yiddish literature and the author of How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms, a comparison of Yiddish literature with the African novel in English and French. He has also completed a forthcoming book on Yiddish literature and German-Jewish culture in Weimar-era Berlin.

About the Editor

Emanuel Thorne, son of the author Leon Thorne, teaches economics at Brooklyn College. He has been a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s
Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. His articles have appeared in the Yale Journal on Regulation, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.