Job: The Story of a Holocaust Survivor

by Joseph Freeman

Overview

With spare prose and in stark images, Joseph Freeman recounts his suffering during the Holocaust from the German invasion of Poland to the liberation of Europe by the Allies. Freeman's narrative includes sober accounts of Nazi atrocities, aching portraits of the noble spirits and unsung heroes who were counted among the walking dead of the concentration camps, and the profoundly moving story of the unexpected reunion of Freeman and the American G.I. who had lifted Freeman's dying body from the mire of a battlefield 40 years earlier.

Both poignant and exquisite in its simplicity, Joseph Freeman's autobiography is at once a shibboleth for those who also endured the unspeakable and a haunting warning for those of us living in these latter days, when the voices of deniers and revisionists of the Holocaust wait to take the place of the aging witnesses who grow weary of their vigil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275955861
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/30/1996
Pages:	146
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1000L (what's this?)

About the Author

JOSEPH FREEMAN was born in Poland in 1915. He immigrated to the United States shortly after the end of World War II. He and his wife, Helen, live in Pasadena, California.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Before the Destruction
Early School Years in Radom
Father's Family in Staszow
Gymnasium and University Years
Hashoah
September 1, 1939
Walowa Street Ghetto
How the City of Radom Died
Selections for the Death Camps
Kromolowsky Factory
Business at Kromolowsky
Isaac
The Ghetto Reduced
Winter 1942-43
"Exchange" of Intellectuals
Letters
Szkolna
Auschwitz
Vaihingen
Schoemberg
First Day
Order
Lester
Lying with the Dead
Hospital in Schoemberg
Transports
Spaichingen
Rebirth
Liberation
Hospital in Fussen
Feldafing
Returban to Radom
Helen
Munich
Pasadena
Broken Silence
Returban to the Ruins
Gates of Tomorrow
Glossary

Editorial Reviews

In 1950, Freeman lived in Munich with his wife and two children, enjoying ``a beautiful home, a good business, and plenty of money.'' But he also lived with a past. As his wife said, ``there's no future here for either us or our children.... I would die if our daughters were to have German friends and marry Germans whose parents could be murderers of our loved ones.'' So in 1951, he and his family emigrated to the United States. Thirty-five years later, after a lecture at the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, Freeman was encouraged to set down his account of the Holocaust. Following a sketchy unsatisfying review of his early life in Poland before the war, he moves on to describe his experiences under the Nazis. They are by now familiar but no less affecting for it: his mother and sister were sent east to death camps from which they would never return; his father and crippled brother were killed immediately; he himself was marched to Auschwitz and later became a slave laborer inside Germany. Freeman's recollections of bravery and acts of kindness give us hope; after an SS labor camp guard attacked him with a knife, nearly severing his head, Freeman crawled to the hospital where a Polish medical student hid him in the room for the dead, then nursed him back to health. Most memorable was Freeman's resolve to survive as a human being at a time when ``a small pot of water, a piece of bread, these equalled a person's life.'' (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The term bastard Keynesianism was coined by economist Joan Robinson after repudiating the economic system she had helped Lord Keynes devise. Like her, Turgeon (economics, Hofstra U.) uses it to refer to US economic policy after World War II. He explains the changes the various administrations have made, the differences and similarities in their policies, and some of the questionable assumptions underlying the thinking. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Freeman was born in 1915 in Radom, Poland, into a middle-class family of religious Jews. He begins his book with memories of his pleasant family life despite the anti-Semitism that prevailed. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and early in 1941 the Freeman family was forced to move into a ghetto. In August 1942, Nazis attacked the ghetto, killing many of the Jews. The author's mother, father, brother, and sister were sent to their deaths. Freeman was taken to work in a leather goods factory; later, he was forced to join other Jews on a three-week march to Auschwitz, and he was shifted to other camps until he was rescued by U.S. Army troops. Freeman ends with his subsequent marriage to another survivor, their immigration to and life in America, and his meeting with the American soldier who had liberated him 40 years earlier. Freeman's understated tone conveys all the more forcefully the horror of life under the Nazis.

George Cohen

"I have read Joseph Freeman's testimony and remain moved by its painful and powerful message. I have never been in Radom, but Freeman brings back fragments of its Jewish life-as well as images of its death. I thank him for sharing his memories with us." -Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and author of Night

"Joseph Freeman's personal narrative is a treasure. He writes movingly of unimaginable horrors at the hands of the Nazis and of his emotional reactions to un-speakable crimes. A deeply religious man, he questions the reasons for his suffering; he is a modern-day Job whose faith is severely tested. His story represents the triumph of determina-tion, a testament of the will to survive. But it also bears witness to the emotional price paid by a survivor and the impact on his family relationships in the decades that followed." -Donald Schwartz, History Department California State University, Long Beach

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