This Paperback Book item from Free Press was reviewed on 5-Nov-2008.
Search ISBN:0684865262 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust Reference Book. Classifications : Jewish Ethnic & National Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books General Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books General AAS Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books General Europe History Subjects Books Genera . Click the following link to view the cover of WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust. Related topics: Jewish. Ethnic & National. Subjects. Books. General. Subjects. Books. General AAS. Subjects. Books. requestid: cfccaf24-b56f-45e5-95ad-881fe7f973e0
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1) Paperback Book WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust by Free Press. It has been more than 60 years since the Holocaust occurred, yet there can never be enough written about this tragedy, especially so since many of the survivors are diminishing in numbers. In Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, we are able to learn about this human tragedy of epic proportions that was the Shoah based on actual testimonies of survivors.
The book is very well-organised and is divided into chapters, i.e. Life in Europe in the 1930s, The Outbreak of War, The Ghettoes, Escape, Hiding, and Resistance, Deportation and Arrival, The Camps, Death Marches, Liberation and Aftermath. Apart from the compelling eyewitness testimonies [not just by survivors, but also in some cases Gentiles], there are also pictures that depict the lives of European Jewry before, during and after the war.
A compelling addition to Holocaust literature and though the stories themselves aren´t lengthy, the horrors that they evoke is enough for us to reflect upon.¤ 2) Paperback Book WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust by Free Press. I read this book several years ago and it had a profound affect on me. It is divided into three sections: life before, life during, and life after the holocaust for Jewish survivors. All the accounts are first-person narratives by the survivors themselves. I believe they were all interviewed on tape for a documentary. And then they put it into print to create this book. Something that surprised me was how prevalent anti-semitism was in the years before the Holocaust. Sometimes we think Hitler suddenly arose out of nowhere with his anti-semitism. But he was actually just "riding a wave" of hatred of the Jews. The Polish people were in particular very hateful of the Jews. It really surprised me how much they had to endure before WWII even began! This book was a compelling read - true accounts directly from those who survived the greatest horror of the 20th Century.¤ 3) Paperback Book WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust by Free Press. This great, compelling story of historical drama and is told from many points of view from that time in history, the 1940´s. The book is set all over in Germany and is told by many different characters. I really liked how the authors described in detail what they felt when,they were being taken to a concentration camp or taken away from their loved ones. This book is a collection of many autobiographies of the survivors in the Holocaust. I loved how this author put together these autobiographies in chronological order, so it was easy to follow. Witness does a great job of telling about the memories that the survivor´s in the Holocaust have had for many years. It also helps you understand what is was like for the Jewish citizens and the huge impact the Germans had on people around the world. This book is for every person that wants to know what it was like in the life of a Jewish man, woman, or child during that horrible time in history.¤ 4) Paperback Book WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust by Free Press. This great, compelling story of historical drama and is told from many points of view from that horrible time, the 1940´s. The book is set all over in Germany and is told by many different characters. I really liked how the authors described in detail what they felt when,they were being taken to a concentration camp or taken away from their loved ones. This book is a collection of many autobiographies of the survivors in the Holocaust. I loved how this author put together these autobiographies in chronological order, so it was easy to follow. Witness does a great job of telling about the memories that the survivor´s in the Holocaust have had for many years. It also helps you understand what is was like for the Jewish citizens and the huge impact the Germans had on people around the world. This book is for every person that wants to know what it was like in the life of a Jewish man, woman, or child during that horrible time in history.¤ 5) Paperback Book WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust by Free Press. 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.¤ 6) Paperback Book WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust by Free Press. A Living Testimony Fifty-five years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust continues to cast a dark shadow. For the past two decades, 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 regime, a project that has led to an acclaimed documentary film and this extraordinary book. The Wall Street Journal called the documentary "eloquent and unsparing," and Daily Variety said it was "a staggeringly powerful record." The Washington Times said that Witness "gives new meaning to the term documentary. [It is] as pure a document as I have ever seen on television." In Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar weave a single and compelling narrative from the first-person accounts of twenty-seven witnesses, including camp survivors, American military personnel, a member of the Hitler Youth, a Jesuit priest, and resistance fighters. 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.¤ 7) Paperback Book WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust by Free Press. "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¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 3-Dec-2008, 06848652629780684865263, 600-620-590-220-180-640-141-8 
WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust, Book, Image © Free Press
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