Many Holocaust survivors have written memoirs, but only some have been published. Many more survivors have been interviewed by scholars, and although thousands of such interviews are in the Yad Vashem archives, very few of these have been published. It is a pity. Interviews are an important source of knowledge, and they are invaluable for gaining an understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust. The recent book by Barbara Engelking is evidence of the value of this type of historical record.

Engelking interviewed ten Holocaust survivors who now live in Poland, asking about their background, Holocaust experiences, and how they felt about it now. Those interviewed had very different backgrounds and experiences; the only thing they had in common was that they were all among the pitifully few Jewish Holocaust survivors who chose to remain in Poland. Six women and four men were interviewed. Two had come from very poor families, while three had been wealthy; four had been part of the intelligentsia, with one of them having been completely assimilated to Polish society; before the war four had engaged in communist activities: together, a sample of pre-war Jewish society in Poland.

The Holocaust experiences the ten had were also very different. Five had been in the Warsaw ghetto. Three had escaped at the beginning of the war to Lwów and experienced the bloody pogroms organized by the Germans and Ukrainians there. Left with no other choice, they had smuggled themselves back in the Warsaw ghetto. Three of those interviewed had been inmates of the Łódź ghetto, and one of the ghetto in Cracow. Five had been prisoners in a concentration camp, while six had lived for an extended period in ‘Aryan’ Poland. Six of the Jews who chose to stay in post-war Poland had been part of the underground, with two having belonged to a partisan unit.

Engelking knows the right questions to ask to elicit the facts and horrors about those sad years: the tormenting hunger in the ghettos, the terrifying deportations, the loss of all who were dear, the endless suffering in the concentration camps, the constant fear on the Aryan side. Moreover, while many were very generous with help, others showed brutal enmity.