Customer Reviews

Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust

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I had to read this book for a class, I am a senior at college. I attend school around the PIttsburgh area, so I am proud to know that this is from here. There is a story Robert Mendler who is a great speaker. he spoke to my class a few weeks ago. It is good to know that the stories are being written down so generations to come will know what happened and how people survived.

Puts together a series of vignettes gathered at a writers workshop at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, of Holocaust survivors who were children or young people when the vents took place.
Highly memorable, touching and at parts harrowing.
Sections on Jewish life before the Holocaust, where witnesses remember their lives in Europe before the Nazi inferno. For example, Marga Randall recalls the wonderful large garden of her childhood home in Schermbeck, Germany, the town which she visited against decades later.
Dora Zueg Iwler recalls how on their final parting her father said "Before I die I would like to see the blue and white Jewish flag". It was her father's dying wish that motivated her to work for the State of Israel making his dream come true in a small way.
The Destruction Of A Society focuses on the brutality of Kristallnacht and the destruction of Jewish life in Germany. Ruthlessness As A system examines the genocide by the Einsatzgruppen and the horrors oft he death camps. Survivors relate what they witnessed and how they survived. The very uncertainty and seeming small chance of whether one would survive is captured in The Lottery of Death And Life. Disguise As A Way of hiding relates how Jewish children and teenagers hid from the Nazi killing machine, often disguised as Christians while The Virtuous and the Vicious deals with the heroic gentiles who risked everything to help Jews to survive, as well as those evildoers who turned Jews in or helped the Nazis in their genocide.
Other chapters examine other aspects. The starkness and horror of the Nazi monstrosity, the tenaciousness of the survivors, and the determination to never forget is brought to life in these pages of this important testimony

Particularly pertinent at a time when Israel-the Jewish state- and the home of so many survivors and their descendants is fighting for her life, against a world in which Jewish life has again become cheap and there are those determined to destroy her and all her people,as vowed by would be Hitler, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.