More than sixty years
ago, fear gripped
the Auschwitz Sonderkommandant – Jewish slave laborers sentenced to work
in the
gas chambers and the crematoria. Fear not just for their own lives, but
for
their people. Some of these men wrote of murders, of the number of Jews
killed,
of their pain and terror. They wrote on scraps of paper, pushed into
bottles
they sealed with wax and buried in the camp grounds. They left these
bottles
because they wanted the world to know of Auschwitz, they wanted their
testimony to
survive even if their people perished. They were afraid, truly afraid,
that no
Jew would live to tell the world what they had experienced.
Yet the Jews survived, and the voices
of men in the shadow of the crematoria came to be joined by thousands of
others. A welter of Holocaust literature has poured from printing
presses in
recent decades. Witness to History is the result of the best of
this
literature. A fusion of solid scholarly research and riveting
first-person
narrative, Witness to History’s innovative approach provides
readers
with a comprehensive understanding of both the causes and the events
that shaped
the Holocaust. Five units cover the era from World War I through
liberation in
1945 and, finally, contemporary views of the Holocaust.
The text interweaves academic content
with personal accounts from a cross-section of eyewitnesses:
ghetto-dwellers
and resistance fighters, learned rabbis and innocent children,
non-Jewish
collaborators and rescuers all add their voices to the book. This volume
provides unique coverage of little-discussed historical events, such as
the
fate of Sephardic Jews and the unique Holocaust experience of religious
Jews.
The eyewitness accounts, together with nearly a thousand pictures and
dozens of
maps, bring history to vivid life. Witness to History transforms
the
Holocaust from a tragedy of the past to a living experience, changing
the
reader’s perception of history, the Jewish spirit, and the power of
faith in
times of adversity.
Produced by Project Witness, an
organization directed by Ruth Lichtenstein and dedicated Holocaust
education
and awareness, Witness to History is the product of a team of
historians, researchers, rabbinical scholars and editors. Ruth
Lichtenstein,
editor-in-chief, is a publisher, an international Holocaust lecturer and
the
author of the Hebrew language Edut, a Holocaust textbook designed for
Orthodox Israeli schools.
The book is accompanied by a
multi-media DVD, with coverage of Holocaust-era music, art and poetry;
an
animated timeline and maps; and personal testimonies of survivors and
children
of survivors. A Teacher’s Guide, developed with education specialists
and Holocaust scholars, is available to aid educators in effectively
planning a
Holocaust-studies curriculum.
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