Fresh Wounds

432 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-7240-6
Published: September 2011
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-6362-6
Published: November 2000
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6957-9
Published: November 2000

Buy this Book

To purchase online via an independent bookstore, visit Bookshop.org

Every student of the Holocaust knows the crucial importance of survivors' testimonies in reconstructing the crime. Most such accounts, however, were recorded years or even decades after the end of World War II. The survivor narratives that make up this volume, in contrast, were gathered immediately after the war. In 1946, Russian-born American psychologist David P. Boder interviewed 109 victims of Nazi persecution--the majority of them Jews--in "Displaced Persons" camps across Europe. The thirty-six accounts collected here possess an immediacy and authenticity that might otherwise be questioned in memoirs penned long after the events they detail.

These interviews encompass survivors from Poland, Lithuania, Germany, France, Slovakia, and Hungary, ranging in age from their early teens to their seventies. Their remarkable stories shed light on such controversial subjects as relations between Jews and neighbors or strangers who extended or withheld aid, opportunities for and obstacles to Jewish resistance, the victims' knowledge--or lack of knowledge--about the fate that awaited them in Nazi hands, survival strategies, women's experience of the Holocaust, the Nazi practice of placing prisoners in charge of their fellow inmates, and the liberators' postwar treatment of freed concentration camp inmates.

In an introduction, Donald Niewyk describes this extraordinary interviewing project and traces the overwhelming obstacles Boder faced in finding an audience for the survivor narratives he collected.

About the Author

Donald L. Niewyk is professor of history at Southern Methodist University. His books include The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation and The Jews in Weimar Germany.
For more information about Donald L. Niewyk, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"There is an extraordinary power to these narratives, which are at times shattering. Unlike the many memoirs that have been written since the war, these accounts have a penetrating power, most likely because of their oral recounting and the freshness of the experiences described."--Studies in Contemporary Jewry

"Provides an important link in the chain of Holocaust documentation. . . . Raises provocative questions about the way in which we process memories and changes in perspective as we achieve distance from trauma."--Hadassah Magazine

"As the title suggests, these narratives are 'fresh' and the acute trauma, pain and anger of the survivors, palpable. It is a book that starkly presents the horrors of war at a micro and individual level and paints a horrific picture of the human capacity for evil. . . . This volume is a rich resource for multi-disciplinary research into the dynamics of conflict."--Ethnic Conflict Research Digest

"Provides stark and immediate testimony of the daily life of Jews under the Holocaust, uninfluenced by what Primo Levi recognized as the 'ever more blurred and stylized memories' of survivors who sought to recall the terrible events years or decades later."--AB Bookman's Weekly

"Fresh Wounds reveals the victims' devastating experiences of pain, loss, and humiliation with compelling authenticity."--Booklist

"Powerful and compelling. Niewyk provides background information and context for these narratives and thus enables the reader to have a coherent narrative of persecution and survival during the Holocaust."--Sybil Milton, former Senior Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum