Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto [Paperback]

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

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2003

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 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. Stunning in their immediacy, these urgent accounts challenge us to imagine the unimaginable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

These twenty-nine first-hand testimonies make up a kind of collective memoir of life in the Warsaw ghetto, from its establishment, in November, 1940, through (and even beyond) its destruction, in 1943. These previously unpublished accounts provide an especially vivid picture of everyday life there, and in particular of the constant struggle to maintain a semblance of civic normality in the face of horrendous daily violence and impending annihilation. At the same time, the narrators do not avoid the bleaker aspects of the ghetto's history, offering a damning picture of, for example, the Jewish police force, which collaborated with the Nazis and became "an institutional accessory to murder." 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. Of the ghetto's nearly five hundred thousand inhabitants, only forty thousand are believed to have escaped.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Picador (November 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312422687
• ISBN-13: 978-0312422684
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,108,755 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For people who want to understand the Holocaust, April 17, 2003

By 

Hau LP (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto (Hardcover)

I read this book after I watched the movie "The Pianist". The true accounts in this book shocked and moved me. By combining with the visual impact from the movie, I am able to relate what I read with what I watched from the movie. After reading the book, I admired the courage, the-will-to-survive, and the brilliance of the Jewish people. I suggest to people who are interested to know what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto, but who has no such background on the holocaust, watched the movie first, then read this book. It is not a dry history book. The acccounts were written by people who have superb writing skill, though they might not know themselves.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Personal Accounts from Hell, February 4, 2004

By 

Scot L. Heminger "Franziskaner lieber" (Southern Colorado) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto (Paperback)

How can one describe the indescribable? In the last several years, I have read maybe a dozen and a half books on the Shoah and have been greatly impressed by many if not all of them. This narrative though, I feel, is head and shoulders above all of the other personal accounts that I have read thus far. Words to Outlive Us is a fascinating read. This, I feel, can be attributed to three things: the structure of the book(it is divided into six chapters each dealing with a particular aspect of life and death inside the Ghetto), the fascinating and in many cases heartbreaking quality of the accounts and finally, the sheer quantity of unique individual accounts. . While none of these components of the book are unique individually, put together they create an unsurpassed narrative of those Jews, who for no other reason than the fact they were Jews, suffered under the Nazis and in many cases, their Polish neighbors. This compilation is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. It is even more amazing when one takes into account the the fact that many of the narratives were actually penned during the events these individuals were living through and for that matter the immense danger that these survivors placed themselves in simply by writing of their experiences as Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Particularly poignant I felt, were the chapters on the institutions of the Ghetto, the resistance and liberation. Through these accounts the reader is seeing day to day life and tragedies as if he or she is witnessing them personally. The reader is a witness to both the greatest acts of kindness and the most horrific acts of violence which human beings are capable of. This is, I believe, the greatest testament to the power of this collection of personal stories. My only disappointment in this book was that it wasn't double it's 440 pages.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How some fought back and why others could or would not, May 3, 2003

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto (Hardcover)

So often, we read accounts of the Shoah afer the fact. Not to diminish their power, but primary testimony as the events happened, understandably a rarer extant survival, speaks directly and eloquently with a visceral power. The accounts here, by a cross-section of thoughtful, self-deprecating, agonized, and bewildered observers, show why those in the ghetto were so diminished and demoralized.

Years of abuse, mental and physical, years of starving and disease and uncertainty wreaked havoc on the Jews in Warsaw. Reading these accounts, you understand how awful were the limited choices between giving in and holding out could both be. Also, what here emerges more fully is the extent to which Jews were exploited with the hopes of work permits, resettlement, visas, and hush money by informers, turncoats, bosses, and those willing or forced to collaborate. The constant anxiety underscores the bodily suffering of the ghetto's inhabitants.

Revealed here are the predicaments hundreds of thousands of people like you and me faced, nearly half-a-million crowded into an area the size of Central Park. What often has been distorted into kitsch or melodrama in later re-creations in its original context remains unforgettably eloquent.