From Library Journal
An unusually detailed diary describing life and death in the Lithuanian ghetto of Kovno from June 1941 to January 1944. Tory, secretary of the Kovno ghetto, managed to save many of the ghetto council's official documents and reports. He also saved photographs, sketches, and drawings which were made by inmates in the ghetto. Most important, Tory kept an almost daily diary of all the events which befell him and his fellow inmates. His grim recordings show the determined attempt of the Germans to destroy all that was human in the ghetto, while the Jews struggled as best they could to survive the horrors meted out to them. This annotated edition is a terrifying and enlightening document, the most detailed diary extant of the major European ghettos. An important contribution to Holocaust literature.
- Jehuda Reinharz, Brandeis Univ., Waltham, Mass.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
When the Germans swept through the Baltic states in the summer of 1941, they left behind scores of ghettos, each with its own "Elders Council" answerable to Gestapo overlords. When they came to the Lithuanian city of Kovno, a young Jewish lawyer, Avraham Tory, began writing a diary about the transformation of his city into his prison. The Kovno council made Mr. Tory its secretary; he started adding documents to his collection--as many Nazi decrees and council reports as he could obtain--and buried them, along with installments of his diary, underneath a ghetto workshop. The resulting book,
Surviving the Holocaust, benefits from Mr. Tory's mobility as a council official; he moved freely inside the ghetto and out, meeting as often with German commandants as with members of the council and with the Jewish underground. (Judith Shulevitz
New York Times Book Review )
The diary is a historical document of major importance. (Robert S. Wistrich
Times Literary Supplement )
Tory's diary is an account of the struggle for survival of ordinary men and women who were suddenly thrust into an insane world where none of the ordinary rules applied. It is a tragic chronicle of heroic endeavor. (John Jacobs
Jewish Chronicle )
A grim and harrowing complement to...existing literature of the Holocaust. Written by Avraham Tory, a survivor who today lives in Tel Aviv, it includes a remarkably detailed account of day-to-day life in the ghetto as well as official German documents sent to the Jewish Council...Above all the diary lucidly records the heroic will to survive and to preserve a minimum of decency and morality while subjected to indescribable degradation. (Robert S. Wistrich
Times Literary Supplement )
[This] is a painful document, its pages a collage of retold events, scraps of news, official German directives, firsthand testimonies, whiffs of rumor and terror...The power of this book lies precisely in its lack of poetry, in its refusal to generalize. The more dispassionately told, the more particular the experience, the more terribly each moment stands out in relief. (Louise Erdrich
Chicago Tribune )
