Holocaust Personal Narratives

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day we honor the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism.  Use the hashtag #WeRemember on social media to share your reflections today.  Here are 10 personal narratives of the Holocaust to consider reading.

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Edith Eva Eger - Internationally acclaimed psychologist Dr. Edith Eger--one of the few remaining Holocaust survivors--tells her unforgettable story in this moving testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of choice in our lives. At the age of sixteen, Edith Eger, a trained ballet dancer and gymnast, was sent to Auschwitz. Hours after her parents were killed, the 'Angel of Death,' Nazi officer Dr. Josef Mengele, forced Edie to dance for his amusement--and her survival. He rewarded her with a loaf of bread that she shared with her fellow prisoners--an act of generosity that would later save her life. Edie and her sister survived multiple death camps and the Death March. When the American troops liberated the camps in 1945 they found Edie barely alive in a pile of corpses. Edie spent decades struggling with flashbacks and survivor's guilt, determined to stay silent and hide from the past. She raised a family, studied and practiced psychology, always refusing to speak about her experiences during the war. Thirty-five years after the war ended Edie returned to Auschwitz and was finally able to fully heal and forgive the one person she'd been unable to forgive for years. Not Hitler. Not Josef Mengele. Herself.

From Broken Glass: My Story of Finding Hope in Hitler's Death Camps to Inspire a New Generation by Steve Ross - On October 29, 1939 Szmulek Rosental's life changed forever. Nazis marched into his home of Lodz, Poland, destroyed the synagogues, urinated on the Torahs, and burned the beards of the rabbis. Two people were killed that first day in the pillaging of the Jewish enclave, but much worse was to come. Szmulek's family escaped that night, setting out in search of safe refuge they would never find. Soon, all of the family would perish, but Szmulek, only eight years old when he left his home, managed to against all odds to survive.
Through his resourcefulness, his determination, and most importantly the help of his fellow prisoners, Szmulek lived through some of the most horrific Nazi death camps of the Holocaust, including Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and seven others. He endured acts of violence and hate all too common in the Holocaust, but never before talked about in its literature. He was repeatedly raped by Nazi guards and watched his family and friends die. But these experiences only hardened the resolve to survive the genocide and use the experience--and the insights into morality and human nature that it revealed--to inspire people to stand up to hate and fight for freedom and justice.
On the day that he was scheduled to be executed he was liberated by American soldiers. He eventually traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, where, with all of his friends and family dead, he made a new life for himself, taking the name Steve Ross. Working at the gritty South Boston schools, he inspired children to define their values and use them to help those around them. He went on to become Boston's Director of Education and later conceived of and founded the New England Holocaust Memorial, one of Boston's most visited sites.

In the Face of Evil: Based on the Life of Dina Frydman Balbien by Tema Merback - A timeless story of the upheavals of war, the tenacious endurance of love and the resilience of the human spirit. It is an epic journey through the nightmare of the Holocaust - the single most defining moment in modern history, as told through the eyes of a young girl.

The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh - Taking us from the beginnings of the liberators' final march across Germany to V-E Day and beyond, Michael Hirsh allows us to walk in the footsteps of the everyday fighting men who were the first Americans to know the full truth about the Holocaust, experiencing the journey as they themselves experienced it. But this book is more than just an in-depth account of the liberation. It reveals how profoundly these young men were affected by what they saw--the unbelievable horror and pathos they felt upon seeing "stacks of bodies like cordwood" and "skeletonlike survivors" in camp after camp. That life-altering experience has stayed with them to this very day. It's been well over half a century since the end of World War II, and they still haven't forgotten what the camps looked like, how they smelled, what the inmates looked like, and how it made them feel. Many of the liberators suffer from what's now called post-traumatic stress disorder and still experience Holocaust-related nightmares.
Here we meet the brave souls who--now in their eighties and nineties--have chosen at last to share their stories.
The Liberators offers readers an intense and unforgettable look at the Nazi death machine through the eyes of the men and women who were our country's witnesses to the Holocaust. The liberators' recollections are historically important, vivid, riveting, heartbreaking, and, on rare occasions, joyous and uplifting. This book is their opportunity, perhaps for the last time, to tell the world.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

Night by Elie Wiesel - Night offers a personal and unforgettable account of the appalling horrors of Hitler's reign of terror. Through the eyes of 14-year-old Eliezer, we behold the tragic fate of the Jews from the little town of Sighet. Even as they are stuffed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, the townspeople refuse to believe rumors of anti-Semitic atrocities. Not until they are marched toward the blazing crematory at the camp's "reception center" does the terrible truth sink in.

Survivor: Auschwitz, the Death March, and My Fight for Freedom by Sam Pivnik - Now in his eighties, Sam Pivnik tells for the first time the extraordinary story of how he survived the Holocaust
Sam Pivnik is the ultimate survivor from a world that no longer exists. On fourteen occasions he should have been killed, but luck, his physical strength, and his determination not to die all played a part in Sam Pivnik living to tell his extraordinary story.
In 1939, on his thirteenth birthday, Pivnik's life changed forever when the Nazis invaded Poland. He survived the two ghettoes set up in his home town of Bedzin and six months on Auschwitz's notorious Rampe Kommando where prisoners were either taken away for entry to the camp or gassing. After this harrowing experience he was sent to work at the brutal F#65533;rstengrube mining camp. He could have died on the 'Death March' that took him west as the Third Reich collapsed and he was one of only a handful of people who swam to safety when the Royal Air Force sank the prison ship Cap Arcona in 1945, mistakenly believing it to be carrying fleeing members of the SS.
He eventually made his way to London where he found people too preoccupied with their own wartime experiences on the Home Front to be interested in what had happened to him.
Now in his eighties, Sam Pivnik tells for the first time the story of his life, a true tale of survival against the most extraordinary odds.

An Unbroken Chain: My Journey Through the Nazi Holocaust by Henry Oertelt - Oertelt, who lived with his older brother and widowed mother in Berlin, had just marked his twelfth birthday when Hitler came to power in January 1933. He begins with a firsthand account of Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938), when the Nazis destroyed Jewish property and synagogues across Germany and Austria, and he recounts the many anti-Jewish directives that followed. Oertelt divides the book into 18 "links" in the chain of events that kept him alive. They include a Nazi foreman who warned him of an impending Gestapo roundup of Jews, giving him time to flee; a 15-month confinement in Theresienstadt concentration camp, where the chance of survival was somewhat better than at Auschwitz; and the fact that he remained in relatively good health and received medical treatment from an SS general-doctor when he did become ill. The two brothers survived, but their mother and most of their relatives were murdered. This is an extraordinary memoir of one brave individual's travail during the Holocaust.

We Survived: Fourteen Histories of the Hidden and Hunted in Nazi Germany by Eric Boehm - Thousands of Jews and "Aryan" Germans opposed to Hitler led illegal lives under the Nazi terror and survived the relentless hunt of the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the bombing. They survived in various ways; some as ordinary citizens taking part in the work-day life, others with fake passports, hidden in cellars, living precariously in all the dark corners of a vigilantly policed country. In fourteen autobiographical accounts, author Eric Boehm offers a cross-section of these heroic personalities. We Survived is itself an historical document, giving a window back into this epoch period during World War II.Now reappearing in print over fifty years after its original publication, We Survived remains as relevant and necessary as ever before - an honest testimony to the strength of the human spirit when it triumphs over adversity.

Witness: Voices from the Holocaust edited by Joshua Greene - Since 1979, 4,000 survivors of and witnesses to the Holocaust have been videotaped for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Eighteen of them will appear in Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, a documentary that will be shown on PBS in May. This remarkable companion book offers first-person accounts of 27 of the survivors and witnesses. Jewish victims describe expulsion from their homes, forced detention in ghettos, and deportation to concentration camps. Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer writes in a foreword that these witnesses do not appear as heroes or martyrs but as chroniclers of a melancholy and dreadful tale. The survivors express guilt over not having done enough to aid their brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers. These testimonies roughly trace life before, during, and after the Nazi era, beginning in the 1930s; and this important book demonstrates the way in which oral testimony contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust.