Guides: Judaism: Primary Sources

Ebooks

Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust by United Jewish Foundation of Greater Pittsburgh Staff; Anita Brostoff (Editor); Sheila Chamovitz (Contribution by)
ISBN: 9780195138719

Publication Date: 2001-05-24

In a series of writing workshops at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, survivors assembled recently to remember the pivotal moments in which their lives were irreparably changed by the Nazis. These "flares of memory" invoke lost childhoods, preserving the voices of over forty Jews from throughout Europe who experienced a history that cannot be forgotten--by them nor us.
Salvaged Pages by Alexandra Zapruder
ISBN: 9780300092431

Publication Date: 2002-03-11

This collection of diaries, written by young people during the Holocaust, reflects a vast and diverse range of experiences - some of the writers were refugees, others were hiding or passing as non-Jews, and some were imprisoned in ghettos. The volume contains extensive excerpts from 15 diaries, ten of which have never before been translated and published in English. The diarists ranged in age from 12 to 22; some survived the Holocaust, but most perished. Taken together, their accounts of daily events and their often unexpected thoughts, ideas and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust.
The 23rd Psalm by George Lucius Salton (Contribution by); Anna Salton Eisen
ISBN: 9780299179700

Publication Date: 2002-09-04

In September, 1939, George Lucius Salton's boyhood in Tyczyn, Poland, was shattered by escalating violence and terror under German occupation. His father, a lawyer, was forbidden to work, but eleven-year-old George dug potatoes, split wood, and resourcefully helped his family. They suffered hunger and deprivation, a forced march to the Rzeszow ghetto, then eternal separation when fourteen-year-old George and his brother were left behind to labor in work camps while their parents were deported in boxcars to die in Belzec.
We Wept Without Tears by Gideon Greif
ISBN: 9780300106510

Publication Date: 2005-11-01

The Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted primarily of Jewish prisoners forced by the Germans to facilitate the mass extermination. Though never involved in the killing itself, they were compelled to be "members of staff" of the Nazi death-factory. This book, translated for the first time into English from its original Hebrew, consists of interviews with the very few surviving men who witnessed at first hand the unparalleled horror of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
Will to Live: One Family's Story of Surviving the Holocaust by Adam Starkopf
ISBN: 9780791426197

Publication Date: 1995-09-14

This book is the story of a Jewish family's survival in Nazi-occupied Poland by assuming "Aryan" identities.
William and Rosalie by William Schiff; Rosalie Schiff; Craig Hanley
ISBN: 9781574412376

Publication Date: 2007-07-02

William & Rosalie is the gripping and heartfelt account of two Polish Jews who survive six different German slave and prison camps throughout the Holocaust. In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, an experimental rabbit job, eyewitness accounts of cannibalism, and the menace of rape in occupied Poland make William & Rosalie an unusually candid view of the chaos that World War II unleashed on the Jewish people.

Survivor Testimonies

British Library Holocaust Recordings
These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. The interviews were selected from a much larger oral history project, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which recorded testimony between 1988-2000.
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is a collection of over 4,400 videotaped interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. Part of Yale University's department of Manuscripts and Archives, the archive is located at Sterling Memorial Library.
Yad Vashem - Voices From the Inferno
This exhibition brings together excerpts from many hours of video testimony given by the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and former combatants in the uprising. Some of the Jews of the ghetto succeeded in escaping the ghetto after the battle that raged there and survived in hiding on the Aryan side, under an assumed identity or in the forests. Others hid deep inside the bunkers in the ghetto, but were ultimately discovered by the Germans and deported to concentration and death camps. There were also the few who managed to survive among the ruins of the ghetto until the liberation. The majority of the Jews who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising were murdered, whether during the brutal suppression of the uprising, while attempting to escape the burning ghetto, in the camps or on the Aryan side. Few survived the inferno; some of their testimonies are presented here.

Print Books

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Call Number: D 810 .J4 F82

Publication Date: 1963

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annex" of an old office building.
Chelmno and the Holocaust by Patrick Montague
Call Number: D 805.5 .C47 M66 2012

ISBN: 9780807835272

Publication Date: 2012-03-15

Also available electronically.
As the first extermination camp established by the Nazi regime and the prototype of the single-purpose death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, the Chelmno death camp stands as a crucial but largely unexplored element of the Holocaust. This book is the first comprehensive work in any language to detail all aspects of the camp's history, organization, and operations and to remedy the dearth of information in Holocaust literature about Chelmno, which served as a template for the Nazis' "Final Solution."
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal; Elie Wiesel (Foreword by)
Call Number: D 810 .C4 B84 2010

ISBN: 9780316043397

Publication Date: 2010-09-16

Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in theU.S. to start a new life.
Night by Elie Wiesel (Preface by); Marion Wiesel (Translator)
Call Number: DS 135 .R13 W543

ISBN: 0809073560

Publication Date: 2006-04-01

Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.
Out of Chaos by Elaine Saphier Fox (Editor); Phyllis Lassner (Introduction by)
Call Number: D 804.48 .O98 2013

ISBN: 9780810129115

Publication Date: 2013-08-31

The stories in Out of Chaos represent brief or elongated moments, fragments of memory and experience, what the great Holocaust writer Ida Fink called a scrap of time. In all, the anthology expresses these survivors memories and reactions to a wide range of experiences as they survived in so many European settings, from Holland, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, and France.
Survival in Auschwitz : the Nazi assault on humanity by Primo Levi
Call Number: D 804 .G3 L66

Publication Date: 1959

In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit.