The Redemption of the Unwanted: From the Liberation of the Death Camps to the Founding of Israel

by Abram Leon Sachar

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312667299
• ISBN13: 9780312667290
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

How the Phoenix of Israel arose from the ashes.

This book takes us from the horrific events of the Holocaust to the the rebirth of the State of Israel like a phoenix from the ashes of the Nazi genocide, and the glorious victory of the Jews (many of them holocaust survivors) against 5 Arab armies. After World War II, there were only 3 million Jews left in Europe from a pre-war population of 9 million. Of the survivors some had lived through the horrors of the concentration camps, others had remained hidden. Most where malnourished and suffering from physical and psychological trauma. Unwanted by the populations of the lands where they had come from, in countries like Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe there were pogroms against Jewish survivors returning to their homes. The survivors were spurned by a distracted Roosevelt and despised by the British. Palestine- the ancient Land of Israel- from where their ancestors had come, but the Arabs where determined not to have them their and the British did all they could to help the Arabs in keeping them out. Thus came the Bricha, a heroic and clandestine operation to smuggle hundreds of thousands of Jewish holocaust survivors into the Land of Israel. Despite overwhelming odds and the opposition of powerful forces, the State of Israel did come into being. This book tells how the State of Israel arose from the ashes of the Holocaust. Chapter 1 describes the horrors uncovered by the Allied forces after the liberation of the concentration and death camps in Central Europe. Chapter 2 tells of the Nazi extermination camps in Poland and the allied inaction in doing anything to prevent the Nazi genocide. In the last year of the war, as the horrors of Auschwitz became common knowledge, the Jewish Agency leadership made urgent appeals to the western Allies to bomb the approaches to the death camps. There had been bases captured in Italy which could be used. Although it was unlikely that the bombings could put the camps out of commission, such attacks would necessarily slow down the massive deportations. The Allies responded that the cost where too great and the diversions too costly. The horrors of the Nazi mass murders are starkly revealed in the early chapters of this book. The following three chapters are about the resistance by Jews to Nazism, most of the resistance being led by Zionist movements; Christian efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials. Chapters Six and Seven tell of the Bricha and Displaced Persons Camps and "illegal" immigration of Jews to Palestine. During World War II the British had turned away tens of thousands of Jews from Palestine, who were fleeing from the Nazi terror. Due to British actions refugee ships such as the Patria and the Struma sank in the Mediterranean killing thousands of Jewish men, women and children aboard. After World War II, the British government did all they could to prevent Jews entering the Land of Israel and we read of the obsessive hatred of Ernest Bevin for Jews

Excellent Book

This book takes you into the death camps of Europe during the end of World War II. Abram Sachar describes vividly the realities of each camp, and the hardships the Jewish people went through. It is perplexing that no country in Europe, and in general no people group, attempted to assist in stopping the German's brutality. However, he goes on to describe how the nation of Israel was created, out from the ashes of this war. This land was the only refuge left for a people that were not welcomed by any nation after the war.