Witness: Voices from the Holocaust [Hardcover]

Joshua M. Greene (Author), Shiva Kumar (Author), Lawrence L. Langer (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 2000

"When the sun came up, it was not like the sun -- I swear to you! It was not bright. It was always red to me; it was always black to me. It never said, never, never was life to me. It was destruction! The sun was never beautiful."

-- Edith P., survivor of Auschwitz and Salzwedel concentration camps

"I was born on the train and I died on the train. I actually didn't know why I was there on the train and what was happening to us. I wasn't even alive. I wasn't there."

-- Bessie K., age 19, deported 1943

"What I felt when the liberation came? That I am alone in the whole world....I had no desire to live. I had no place to go. I had nobody to talk to. I was just simply lost, without words."

-- Hanna F., sole survivor of her family of five

Fifty-five years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust continues to cast a dark shadow. Historians, theologians, philosophers, and others have tried to explain how and why the Holocaust occurred, but their theories often give short shrift to the personal accounts of the individuals involved. For the past twenty years, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University has sought to preserve the human side of this inhuman era by videotaping testimonies from those who lived through the Nazi era, a project that has led to an acclaimed documentary film and this extraordinary book. As the noted Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer writes in his foreword, "Without survivor testimony, the human dimension of the catastrophe would remain a subject of speculation. The voices of the victimized provide us with an intimate glimpse of daily existence [and] furnish a version of the atrocity that the killers chose not to preserve."

In "Witness: Voicesfrom the Holocaust," Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar weave a single and compelling narrative from the first-person accounts of twenty-seven witnesses, including Jews, Gentiles, Americans, a member of the Hitler Youth, a Jesuit priest, resistance fighters, and child survivors. They tell stories of life under the Nazis, in the ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps, and they recount the mixed emotions that accompanied liberation and persisted in the years following the Holocaust. Their experiences reveal what it is like to live in a world where there were no clear moral options, and most choices were between bad and worse; even for those who survived, there were no happy endings. The vivid and detailed memories of these witnesses testify to the continuing impact of this human catastrophe, and their impassioned words lend immediacy to events that resonate to this day.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Sometimes at night I lay and I can't believe what my eyes have seen. I really cannot believe it." --Helen K., Auschwitz survivor

So much has been written about the Holocaust, from academic treatises to popular histories, but it's rare to find a book that captures the texture of everyday living in Nazi Germany. Witness is such a gem. Since 1979, Yale University has videotaped testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Twenty-seven of these first-person accounts have been woven into Witness, creating a rough narrative of life before, during, and after the Nazi era. The witnesses are a diverse group: Colonel Edmund M.'s unit liberated Mauthausen concentration camp, Robert S. was in the Hitler Youth, Werner R. survived a death march that killed thousands, Celia K. joined the partisans and sabotaged German railways. The editors wisely remain on the fringe; capsule biographies of each witness and brief introductory pieces allow the testimony to take center stage. Herbert J. was an American POW liberated from Mauthausen concentration camp. He describes how local children were encouraged to assault the prisoners as they were marched to the quarry for work. One girl:

...had a barrel stave. She come and she hit me with it, and I was stubborn and I wouldn't fall down right off easy. And she hit me a couple of times, and finally I went down ... and she bent over me, and she's calling me names and whatnot, and she says quietly, "Here! Here!" And so I reach up defensively and she's poking something at me. It was soft, and I put it inside my shirt. Brotenspeck--broiled pork fat between German bread. Every day after that she was there and she'd do the same thing--only it didn't take as many whacks with that barrel stave to get me to fall down. ... And she never got caught. It would have cost her her life.

Abraham P., a Romanian Jew who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, remembered telling his little brother to stay with their parents when they arrived at Auschwitz. "Little did I know that--that I sent him to the--to the crematorium. I am--I feel like--I killed him [crying]." When Helen K.'s brother died in her arms en route to Majdanek, she made up her mind "that I'm going to defy Hitler. I'm not going to give in. Because he wants me to die, I'm going to live." Many of these accounts are painful to read, but, as noted Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer writes in his foreword, "Without survivor testimony, the human dimension of the catastrophe would remain a subject of speculation." Witness illuminates this dimension, providing a powerful and personal history of the Holocaust. --Sunny Delaney

From Publishers Weekly

Textbooks and historical accounts can provide a broad view of the Holocaust, but nothing can come close to the power of the testimony of those who were there. As Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer writes in his introduction to this collage of first-hand accounts, "Without survivor testimony, the human dimension of the catastrophe would remain a subject of speculation." For more than two decades, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University has been videotaping the oral histories of Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses. This extraordinary project has resulted in a documentary that will air on PBS in April and in this companion book. Editors Greene, a filmmaker, and Kumar, a scholar specializing in ethics and morality in global TV production, have woven together the testimonies of 27 individuals into an unforgettable narrative of the Holocaust: starting with pre-WWII Jewish life, they go on to describe the war's outbreak, ghettos, resistance and hiding, death camps, death marches, liberation and life after the Holocaust. Through careful selection and sequencing, the editors have succeeded in their goal: "to edit without editorializing." These painfully sad testimonies speak for themselves, providing the horrific details of people's experiences. The common link among these speakers is the eternal scars they bear. One survivor concludes his remarks with the haunting words: "I can't tell you everything in an interview. I couldn't even describe one day in the ghetto. I don't want to live with that pain, but it's there. It's there. It forms its own entity and it surfaces whenever it wants to." These voices bring us a step closer to comprehending the lasting anguish of the Nazi genocide. Photos. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (April 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684865254
• ISBN-13: 978-0684865256
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #916,736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, May 9, 2000

By 

N. Bernadsky "ski429" (Conway, AR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Witness: Voices from the Holocaust (Hardcover)

I picked up this book in a local bookstore one afternoon, not planning to buy it, just to glance through since I'm very interested in the Holocaust. I was late picking my mother up from work because I became so caught up in it. What I appreciated most about Witness was the many different viewpoints presented, I can't remember another time where I was able to read a Hitler Youth's account of the happenings, and I had not read all that many accounts by American POWs. I spent an entire afternoon and late into the night reading the book straight through, and it was definitely time well spent. I agree with the previous reviewer in that the stories arent' quite so graphic as many I have come across, and yet I think since it is in each of the witnesses own words, nothing altered, not even grammar, it is so much more poignant. I would definitely recommend Witness to anyone searching for a greater knowledge of what occured in the camps and throughout Germany and Poland during this horrific time.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, April 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Witness: Voices from the Holocaust (Hardcover)

Witness: Voices from the Holocaust gives a very detailed account of the Holocsust, beginning in the early 1930's of Europe. Twenty-seven individuals are interviewed in the first person. Jews, Gentiles, Hitler Youth, priests, and others tell their story of their life and memories during these years. I found the book to be very educational and informative. It is not too graphic even though it does give you a very realistic view of life as it was when Hitler was controlling Germany.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Private Horror!, June 25, 2002

By 

Tim Johnson (Fremantle, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust (Paperback)

As opposed to earlier commentators I do not come from a background rich in readings on the subject of the Holocaust and therefore Witness came as a unexpected mine of memories of people that had experienced the unimaginable.
My knowledge of the events of the Holocaust were almost exclusively from video documentaries and those documentaries had left many unanswered questions: questions about the Transportation, about the Marches after the camps closed late in the war, about the closing of the ghettos, about the long-term hiding, about the massive anti-semitism that greeted the survivors after the war upon returning "home" and finally the Jewish guerrilla bands that sprang up throughout eastern Europe.
The remarkable thing about this great exercise is the broadness of the interviews that compose the book: the authors assembled a very wide ranging collection of these interviews that spoke about all the topics that I had only heard snatches about in the video documentaries. It was all the more remarkable because these were all primary sources-they were not what somebody had interpreted but the memories of the people that lived the experience and because of this the book had an enormous impact on this reader.
I am a slow reader and the book absorbed me totally and I finished it in a matter of days.
If you read no other book about the Holocaust-read this one.