Witness : Voices from the Holocaust

So much has been written about the Holocaust, from academic treatises to popular histories, but it's rare to find a book that captures the texture of everyday living in Nazi Germany. Witness is such a gem. Since 1979, Yale University has videotaped testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Twenty-seven of these first-person accounts have been woven into Witness, creating a rough narrative of life before, during, and after the Nazi era. The witnesses are a diverse group: Colonel Edmund M.'s unit liberated Mauthausen concentration camp, Robert S. was in the Hitler Youth, Werner R. survived a death march that killed thousands, Celia K. joined the partisans and sabotaged German railways. The editors wisely remain on the fringe; capsule biographies of each witness and brief introductory pieces allow the testimony to take center stage. Herbert J. was an American POW liberated from Mauthausen concentration camp. He describes how local children were encouraged to assault the prisoners as they were marched to the quarry for work. One girl:

...had a barrel stave. She come and she hit me with it, and I was stubborn and I wouldn't fall down right off easy. And she hit me a couple of times, and finally I went down ... and she bent over me, and she's calling me names and whatnot, and she says quietly, "Here! Here!" And so I reach up defensively and she's poking something at me. It was soft, and I put it inside my shirt. Brotenspeck--broiled pork fat between German bread. Every day after that she was there and she'd do the same thing--only it didn't take as many whacks with that barrel stave to get me to fall down. ... And she never got caught. It would have cost her her life.

Abraham P., a Romanian Jew who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, remembered telling his little brother to stay with their parents when they arrived at Auschwitz. "Little did I know that--that I sent him to the--to the crematorium. I am--I feel like--I killed him [crying]." When Helen K.'s brother died in her arms en route to Majdanek, she made up her mind "that I'm going to defy Hitler. I'm not going to give in. Because he wants me to die, I'm going to live." Many of these accounts are painful to read, but, as 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." Witness illuminates this dimension, providing a powerful and personal history of the Holocaust. --Sunny Delaney