Voices from the Holocaust

by Sylvia Rothchild, Elie Wiesel (Foreword)

Transcripts of tape recordings in the William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee.

Genres: Holocaust, World War II, History, Nonfiction

456 pages, Hardcover

First published April 21, 1981

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to read. Not just because of its content which, as one can imagine, is at times difficult to grasp the brutality of human nature, but by the nature of how the content is presented.

Divided into 3 sections ...pre-war, peri-war and post-war... each person's narrative makes a new chapter. Some of their stories are carried through each section but you'd better have a really good memory for names and places because Sylvia Rothchild does not link them.

Further the narratives are bland. They are after all being transcribed from aural interviews and much of the innuendo, body language is lost. It comes across as almost deadpan ...expressionless. Sometimes this heightens the words being said.
Sometimes it doesn't.
Leaving a lot ...maybe too much.. interpretation required on the readers part.

It has however made me want to read Elie Wiesel's Night which is supposed to be one of the best accounts of this time period.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I might have changed the format and read each story as a whole--it was divided into before Germany took over their home country, during the holocaust, and then after the holocaust, their impressions of life in America. Of course, I can see pros and cons for both. There were many insights to be drawn from these stories, one of which is that most of them became very active in their community after the war in an extremely charitable way. They were, for the most part, not materialistic (though their families may have been before.) Even those who had a very hard time adjusting to American life (those who did not speak a word of English when they came AND came at an older established age) went out of their way to reiterate how much they were enjoying their lives now and were happy. I would hope it does not really take such an horrible trauma in our lives to make us come to this...