Survivor Testimony

I Promised I Would Tell by Sonia Shreiber Weitz

Holocaust educator and survivor Sonia Schreiber Weitz has been called “a survivor with a poet’s eye.” Her memoir, I Promised I Would Tell, includes her story of survival and more than two dozen poems through which she bears witness to the unspeakable. Through poetry and testimony, Weitz gives life to the millions of children, men, and women who were murdered during the Holocaust.

Born in Krakow, Poland,, Weitz was 11 years old when her family and other Polish Jews were herded into ghettos. Of the 84 members of her family, she and her sister Blanca were the sole survivors of years in ghettos and concentration camps. She turned to poetry at an early age to cope with her emotions.

Survival: Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories

Edited by Wendy Whitworth

There is no description for this book 

Cirla’s Story by Cirla Lewis

An autobiography of the author and her family (Italiaander), Jews from Antwerp, from the viewpoint of herself as a child (she was born in 1935). When the war broke out, they failed in an attempt to flee and had to return to Antwerp. Cirla's father was taken to a labor camp and later died in Auschwitz.

As an innocent observer, unable to comprehend the events taking place around her, Cirla’s recollections have a dreamlike quality that makes them all the more poignant.

For a number of years Cirla has worked as an educator at the permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, where she draws on her own childhood experiences to teach today's younger generation about the Holocaust.

A Detail of History by Arek Hersh

How do you survive when all your family have been taken from you and killed? How do you continue to live, when everything around you is designed to ensure certain death? Arek Hersh tells his story simply and honestly, a moving account of a little boy who made his own luck and survived. He takes us into the tragic world imposed on him that robbed him of his childhood. The depth of tragedy, strength of courage and power of survival will move you and inspire you. Contrary to assertions that the Holocaust years were a mere 'detail of history', Arek Hersh gives us a glimpse into the greatest catastrophe that man has ever inflicted on his fellow man.

Did you Ever Meet Hitler, Miss?  By Trude Levi

A Holocaust Survivor talks to young people.

Teaching the Holocaust is a difficult and sensitive task. The facts and figures are readily available but it is the individual experiences that engage and interest pupils and allow them to understand the full implications of the Holocaust. Consequently, this book by Trude Levi will prove an invaluable teaching tool. Trude tells her story with little comment, allowing the terrible facts to speak for themselves. She describes without sentiment her experiences in Hungary under the Nazis, the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald and, finally, the death-march, during which she collapsed on her twenty-first birthday and was left for dead. This account provides the context for the main part of the book in which the author sets out some of the many questions she has been asked by schoolchildren and university students from both Germany and England.

Erika’s Story by Ruth Zee

A woman recalls how she was thrown from a train headed for a Nazi death camp in 1944, raised by someone who risked her own life to save the baby's, and finally found some peace through her own family.

Erika's Story is one woman's account of the tragedy of the Holocaust. Erika is a survivor who recalls the difficult decisions her parents had to make and how those decisions have affected her life. Erika has a quiet hope and confidence which is sure to inspire readers. The exquisite illustrations of Roberto Innocenti are poignant and moving. The combination of words and pictures in this book speak not only to the reader's head but also to the heart. The foreign rights to Erika's Story have been sold in eleven countries. 

I Came Alone – The Story of the Kindertransports

By Bertha Leverton

This book presents accounts of persons who were brought to Great Britain as unaccompanied children in 1939 from the Greater Reich (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia). Concentrating mostly on their lives in England and in North America, many of them also relate their experiences under the Nazi regime. 

I Light a Candle by Gena Turgel

Out of the ashes of the Nazi concentration camps came an extraordinary love story which caught the public's imagination at the end of World War II. This autobiography tells how the author survived the camps and met her husband, a sergeant working for British intelligence, when he arrived to round up the SS guards for interrogation. Norman Turgel, then a young man, was among the first to enter the camp on April 15, 1945, and like so many battle-hardened soldiers, was deeply shocked and angered by the human suffering and degradation he witnessed. Yet it was here, in the midst of the living evidence of the most terrible suffering that man has ever inflicted on his fellow human beings, that he fell in love at first sight. Gena, a young Polish Jewish inmate of the camp, who had experienced indescribable loss, hardship, and deprivation, was to survive and find happiness against all odds. This is Gena's story: the autobiography of a woman whose strength of spirit enabled her to keep her mother alive and thereby save herself. When Gena married Norman in Germany in October 1945 in a wedding dress made of British parachute silk, the British Army Rabbi proclaimed their love a symbol of hope after so much death. But, Gena still lights a candle in memory of her three brothers and two sisters who died in the Holocaust. And, while her own story has a happy ending, she can never forget.

Faces In The Smoke by Josef Perl

It's brutal and honest, full of love and determination in the face of utter despair. It's humanity reduced to its core foundations. No one should ever forget what Josef and his generation went through. We need to learn from past mistakes and strive to work towards a better future.

“Josef Perl was just 10 years old when he and his family were forced from their home in Czechoslovakia into a concentration camp. He used to regularly escape to forage for food, and during one of these missions, the camp was cleared. Josef spent the next 18 months alone, trying to find his family.

Josef went on to survive a number of camps including Płaszów, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald, where he was eventually liberated.

After he retired, Josef dedicated his time to ensuring that the world would never forget what happened to him, his family and the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, reliving his most painful memories to ensure that future generations would always know the truth of the past.   

From Belsen To Buckingham Palace by Paul Oppenheimer

Paul Oppenheimer’s memoirs are not just another testimony of the Holocause, They are a valuable historical document – especially concerning the fate of the children in Bergen-Belsen. They are also a fascinating life-history

Paul Oppenheimer's memoirs are not just another testimony of the Holocaust. They are a valuable historical document - especially concerning the fate of the children in Bergen - Belsen. They are also a fascinating life - history of a Jewish family before, during and after the Holocaust. This unsentimental and very readable book does not enable us to understand the Holocaust as a whole, but it at least acquaints us with some of its victims, their hopes and fears, their lives and fates, as individuals like you and me. Oppenheimer's book reminds us just how much history consists of stories. 

Life In Two Countries by John Hajdu

John Hajdu's self-published autobiography 'Life in Two Countries' is a striking story of distress and rescue, occupation and liberation, flight and reconstruction. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1937 he lived a happy life with his parents. And then the Nazis invaded. In 1943 his father was taken away to a forced labour camp. A similar fate befell his mother in 1944 and John was taken by an aunt and both managed to stay with a non-Jewish family. After the war ended, both parents miraculously returned but later divorced. John then lived in Budapest under the Communists until 1956 when he and his mother fled. They managed to come to England in 1957 and after staying in two refugee camps, they eventually moved to London and started a new life.