This is the story of a people, its origin, its history, its struggle for survival and its tragic end—the life-and-death story of Polish and other Eastern European Jewries. It is all this and more; more than a mere historical sketch or an episodic narrative of human greatness, more than a record of fighting gallantry and Nazi gore. It is the epic of a people, its prose and its poetry, its piety and devotional consecration, its visions of a heavenly glory in an environment of collective disapproval, its never-fading hopes amidst strains of despair—a people that lived by the book and died by the sword. The vitality of these Jewries in so strange an environment—an underprivileged, underground minority, at best as citizens in exile—has been a puzzle to historians. Somehow their rise did not fit in with orthodox sociological theories or historical precedents. Neither did their tragic end, and while their life was a miracle, their execution is a nightmare which shall not cease plaguing the human mind, if not man’s conscience.—From Author’s Preface
The heart-breaking story of Joseph Tenenbaum who visited Poland in 1945 after the end of the Second World War in search of his Jewish relatives. “I can only report fragments of what I saw and heard or read during my two and a half months abroad. But these fragments seem to me to be not only of moment to Jews. Despite all the investigating commissions and international committees on behalf of Jewry, the world knows little enough of the depths of human degradation or the great surges of spirit and individual flashes of heroic greatness that have been revealed. There is a clash of two worlds, a clash that has not ceased with the death of Hitler in the gasoline flames in the cellars of the German chancellery. The sparks from the body-burning stakes at the Janowska camp in Lwow, of the ovens at Majdanek, Treblinka and Belzec, and the flames of the chimneys at Birkenau, Sobibor, Oranienburg and Mauthausen, have seared the human soul and scarred the human conscience. We cannot avoid facing the truth simply by ignoring it or driving it underground. The sanity of man, his very soul, requires a thorough catharsis which can come only through frank discussion, through revealing the naked evil in all its deformity and horror. We must think through all the implications, past and present, and realize their full dimensions. Only thus can sanity and moral strength be preserved for future generations. In short, while this book aims at giving a frank presentation of facts and conditions, it is hoped that it may offer a modest educational contribution towards a better world.”—From the Author’s Introduction
Joseph Tenenbaum sketches a portrait of the infamous “Commandant of Auschwitz”, Rudolf Hoess. “Rudolf Hoess has killed more people than any man in history, and Auschwitz was the greatest charnel house of all times. There has been no dearth of publications about the place or the person. [...] It seems that after a period of repudiation of the crimes and apologia for them, we are entering an era of memoirs by boastful generals and complacent Nazi small fry, eager to bask in the sun of regained self-confidence and unregenerate Nazi mentality. The Hoess memoirs are an exception to both trends. His revelations are neither apologetic nor an attempt at vindication. The memoirs are indeed a unique literary document, in which the author is trying to explain, first and foremost himself to himself, Hoess to Hoess, and incidentally also to shed light on the most hidden mainsprings of a mind gone criminal.”—From Author’s Preface
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