Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz

Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz has written a couple of Holocaust memoirs. This is the longest and most complete of them, though some of her other books contain details not mentioned in this one. A teenager when the war began, she was first in the Lodz Ghetto and then in Auschwitz, and lost her entire family except for her sister. Her family were very religious Orthodox Jews and she seems have to have remained so throughout her life.

This book is written to Anna's son Yossi, who died of sudden cardiac arrest at 45, and she addresses him directly throughout the text. She covers her life in detail from birth up through middle age, when as an adult learner at Brooklyn College she took a writing course and began at last to confront the past she had tried very hard to forget about. At the end she also includes some short testimonies from survivors that apparently didn't write their own memoirs.

This is a good enough Holocaust memoir, but it's very long. I can't say I found any parts that should have been cut out, but there are other just as good memoirs that are shorter. The book also had more than its share of typos and punctuation errors.… (más)

An excellent collection of short testimonies (mostly no more than a page or so long) detailing various aspects of life in the Lodz Ghetto. The editor's notes provide context. She herself was a Lodz Ghetto survivor. The passages she picked out really illustrate just how things really were there.

I do wish she'd written more about how these testimonies were obtained, though. I recognize some from memoirs and diaries, and some were apparently gleaned in postwar interviews. But one in particular puzzles me: it's by the editor's fourteen-year-old cousin, and the editor notes that her cousin was deported to a death camp in 1941. How, then, did she get his testimony? Did he write it down? Did she simply assume his voice and tell what she knew had happened to him?

This is, in any case, a great book for researchers and larger Holocaust collections.… (más)

This is the journal of Ruthka Lieblich, a Polish Jew from World War II. She wrote in her diary from age 13 to age 16, at which time she was deported to Auschwitz and gassed. A gentile friend kept the diary after the war and it wound up being published. Ruthka had obvious literary talent and wrote short stories and poetry. She wrote her diary in Polish and occasionally in Hebrew, and she tried her hand at English too.

At the beginning of the book there's a translator's preface, an editor's preface and an introduction to add context to the story. You learn about some of the people Ruthka mentions in her diary, and about the fate of her hometown, which was situated not far from Auschwitz. Of the 300 Jewish people living in the village of Andrichow, only 25 survived the war. Two of Ruthka's cousins survived; the rest of her family was killed. At the end of the book there are some letters Ruthka wrote to her friends, as well as her surviving cousins' descriptions of her. She apparently had a chance to go into hiding, but she refused because she didn't want to be separated from her family.

Although the subheading is "A Diary of War," I think that's a misnomer. You can almost forget that Ruthka is writing all this in Nazi Europe. She only occasionally mentions the war and Hitler and the persecution of the Jews. Instead, Ruthka concentrates on her relationships with her friends, ponderings on what it means to be a Jew, her desire to move to Palestine, and ponderings about God. She became more intensely religious as the diary went on, although she seems to have remained an "assimilated" (rather than Orthodox or Hassidic) Jew.

I think Ruthka's diary has earned its place among the other young people's Holocaust diaries. It would probably be a good companion to the diary of Moshe Flinker, another very religious Jew in Nazi Europe.… (más)