Zachor: Child Survivors Speak by Stephen Smith
This book contains the memoirs of twenty-four Jewish children. Some were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, and others, whose very existence was threatened, lived in hiding and often constant danger. Yet all survived the terrible consequences of the Nazi's plan to exterminate European Jewry. Originally intended as a commemoration to provide their own children and grandchildren with a permanent account of their ordeal, the collection grew to become a unique collection of memories and personal accounts of this horrendous time. Few other accounts have been published exclusively written by children who survived the Holocaust. Their experiences of losing parents, siblings and relatives; hiding in ghettos; on the run; sometimes abused, and the erosion of their identities, combine to provide a vivid and moving perspective on a too little recognised aspect of an appalling period in European history. How did the children cope? After the chaos of the second world war ended, some were re-united with parents just as traumatised as they were and nearly all ended up in countries other than their own. The need to learn a new language and culture, and even sometimes a new religion, caused even more confusion. It is sometimes said that children are often too young to remember things. These moving and often unbearably painful testimonies provide the reader with an epic sense of wonder that such courage and humanity can still ignite a flame of hope and personal reconciliation in one of the darkest periods of human history.