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Why do I begin with the parachutists? Were I to trace the story of Jewish resistance and rescue chronologically, I would have to use a different order. I would have to begin with the gradual…
The day he was gone her suitor arrived. I don’t know what else to call him. He advertised himself as my uncle, but he didn’t have our famous cheekbones and Tatar eyes. He couldn’t have belonged to…
For Elie Wiesel
Not literally. Due to my father’s foresight (he had shown it when leaving Vienna in 1924), I came to America in January 1940, during the phony war. We left France, where I was born and…
For the past few years, both in France and Germany, I was awed by the valiant struggle of people who, though only recently liberated from indescribable cruelty, exhibited extraordinary powers of…
I had a very unusual fifteenth birthday. During my birthday week, the end of April, I was traveling with 5,000 high school students from around the world, visiting concentration camps in Poland. I…
Among the very few possessions my parents were permitted to take with them when they emigrated as refugees from Austria to Bolivia in June 1939 was a box camera and two family photo…
Leaving the museum, our small party walked the fifteen minutes out of the center of town it takes to get to the business end of Theresienstadt, the so-called “Small Fortress.” First constructed in the…
Photographs shock us in so far as they show us something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter with…
There was a rumpled old Polish man who boarded in the apartment of our building’s superintendent. With baggy pants, fraying suspenders, a wrinkled hat, and a wooden cane, he looked like the lovable…
[…] On my first research trip to France as a professional scholar in the summer of 1982, I set out to find the only fascist intellectual discussed in my dissertation who was still alive; his name was…