Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto

by Michal Grynberg (Editor), Philip Boehm (Translator)

Overview

The story of the Warsaw Ghetto told through twenty-eight never-before-published accounts-a precious and historic find.

In the history of the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto stands as the enduring symbol of Jewish suffering and heroism. This collective memoir-a mosaic of individual diaries, journals, and accounts-follows the fate of the Warsaw Jews from the first bombardments of the Polish capital to the razing of the Jewish district. The life of the ghetto appears here in striking detail: the frantic exchange of apartments as the walls first go up; the daily battle against starvation and disease; the moral ambiguities confronting Jewish bureaucracies under Nazi rule; the ingenuity of smugglers; and the acts of resistance.

Written inside the ghetto or in hiding outside its walls, these extraordinary testimonies preserve voices otherwise consigned to oblivion: a woman doctor whose four-year-old son is deemed a threat to the hideout; a painter determined to complete his mural of Job and his trials; a ten-year-old girl barely eluding blackmailers on the Aryan side of the city. Stunning in their immediacy, the urgent accounts recorded here provide much more than invaluable historical detail: they challenge us to imagine the unimaginable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466804340
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/01/2003
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

The late Michal Grynberg, an associate of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and a noted Polish scholar of the Holocaust, devoted decades of his life to compiling and publishing firsthand accounts from ghettos throughout Poland.

Philip Boehm is the author of numerous translations from Polish and German, including works by Franz Kafka, Ida Fink, and Christoph Hein. Based in St. Louis, he is also a playwright and theater director.

The late Michal Grynberg, an associate of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, devoted decades of his life to compiling and publishing firsthand accounts from ghettos throughout Poland.

Philip Boehm has translated more than thirty novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, and Hanna Krall. For these translations he has received numerous awards, including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships and most recently the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. He also works as a theater director and playwright.

Editorial Reviews

The heroic defense of the Warsaw Ghetto by its Jewish inhabitants in 1943 was among the most dramatic episodes of World War II. This collection renders the story of the entire saga, from the walling-off of the Ghetto in 1940 to its final destruction by the Nazis, with unprecedented vividness. Editor Michael Grynberg presents the story of the Jewish resistance through 28 never-before-published first-person accounts.

bn.com

Among Holocaust literature, these precious narratives come closest to telling us how it was in these dark times.

Marek Web

The 29 never-before-published diaries, letters and personal accounts in the late historian Grynberg' s vital collection offer a devastating portrait of life in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943. Less than 1% of the almost 500,000 Jews confined there survived the disease, malnutrition and deportation to concentration camps; a handful of the contributors escaped the ghetto by navigating the sewer system to the Aryan side of Warsaw. Historian Emanuel Ringelblum' s noted journals provided an exhaustive, firsthand record of the Warsaw Ghetto, but these skillfully translated records by shopkeepers and doctors, dentists and schoolgirls are more powerful. Ghetto residents write of needing to get permission to bake matzoh, longing for the patter of autumn rain or hiding in a room with 200 stifling, hot, dirty, stinking people; two cases of full-blown tuberculosis; one of measles. Several of the diarists are members of the Jewish police, who express the agony of trying to provide for their families while collaborating with the enemy. The diversity of the contributors' cultural and economic backgrounds adds to the mural of a variegated Jewish Warsaw during Nazi occupation; mostly translated from Polish, the different voices include assimilationists, traditionalists, communists, socialists and Zionists. Some are despairing; others, like the brilliant Helena Midler, whose parodic Bunker Weekly stuck out its tongue at hardship, find ways to laugh. Many of the accounts note the meticulous planning behind the Nazis' dizzying regulations, and the editor adds relevant data, including maps and detailed rosters of laborers. If one can read only one book on the Warsaw Ghetto, this is it. (Oct. 2) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Tells the story in a new way, with riveting immediacy. . . The Diary of Anne Frank was a poignant solo piece for cello. Words to Outlive Us is a work of full orchestral anguish.” —Time

“One can hardly imagine anything more authentic than these testimonials.. . .One has at times an almost theatrical sense of the many narrators stepping out individually from the darkness, each telling a piece of his or her story and then stepping back again.” —Los Angeles Times

“One comes away from the book stunned by the remarkable energy and willingness to resist that so many demonstrated but haunted by the recognition of how little that resistance availed.” —The New Yorker

“A devastating portrait. . . If one can read only one book on the Warsaw Ghetto, this is it.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher