Leipzig in the 1980's, a city that was admired as the leader of the rebellion against Communism in East Germany, the city that became the battering ram that smashed the Berlin Wall. Leipzig in the 1930's had a less distinguished history. It was just another Nazi city where goose-stepping goons and apathetic "good Germans" joined in sealing the doom of its Jewish community. Like its sister cities, Leipzig began by tightening the noose of persecution, went on to turn the daily life of its Jews into a constant ordeal, and climaxed its descent to degradation with the orgy of Kristalnacht. What was it like growing up in Jewish Leipzig? How did it all seem through the eyes of a child who was eventually to survive and become a Talmudic scholar of world repute? What images and traumas were carved into the psyche of a bright, gentle Jewish youngster? In this remarkable book, Rabbi Shlomo Wharman looks back more than half a century to the happiness of his youth and lets us watch with him as joys turn to terror and beauty to ugliness. This book is filled with warm, knowing portraits of Orthodox life in the rich German tradition and keen insights into the feelings and reactions of ordinary people as their world turned mad around them. As a compassionate, sensitive human being. Rabbi Wharman brings us the scenes of his youth and the people he loved and admired, as they appeared in the reality of a youngster's world. As an accomplished scholar, he went back to Leipzig to research this book and he includes documentation and memoirs, much of it never before published in English. Informative, loveable, perceptive, real, this is an important book for those who seek a different perspective of the Holocaust. It is rich, memorable, inspiring and there is none other like it.
by Rabbi Shlomo Wahrman