Customer Reviews

Life Death Memories

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Life Death Memories is the deeply personal and candid recollections of Thomas T. Hecht, a Jewish man who grew up in a Polish shetl during the murderous years of Hitler's horrific and genocidal "Final Solution". Hecht's village culture was obliterated in the wake of the Holocaust; scarce survivors and scarcer memories of it remain today. A memorial to those murdered and a powerful testimony to the human capacity for mass atrocity, Life Death Memories is a welcome addition to Holocaust Studies reference collections and not-to-be-missed powerful reading.

This is a book well worth reading! Mr. Hecht does not attempt to tell the whole story of World War 2, --all the politics and power struggles, social pressures, and such. Instead, he describes personal life for his family and acquaintances during that time, bringing out details we normally miss in the broad-brush accounts from other books about the war.
He doesn't go into great, gory detail about hardships his Jewish family experienced. He just matter-of-factly describes what must have been times of great horror with very little of what could be called sensationalism. He brought knowledge of World War 2 at a personal level.
This was a difficult book to put down, which I suppose is a sign of a well-written book. I read it in two sittings.