Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto

by Michal Grynberg

Book Overview

This collective memoir--a mosaic of individual diaries, journals, and accounts--follows the fate of the Warsaw Jews from the first bombardments of the Polish capital to the razing of the Jewish... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805058338
• ISBN13: 9780805058338
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Holocaust accounts

I wonder what these people would have become if they had had the opportunity to live? Makes one very reflective.

Required Holocaust Reading

THe breadth of these first-person journal entries is awesome and profound. These are real voices from the Warsaw Ghetto. They truly are Words to outlive us. I have been lately somewhat obsessed with the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto. I have read several books about the time, and the plight of the Jews there. This one gives such powerful details, organized around around different subjects. These are the words of the people who lived it.

Personal Accounts from Hell

How can one describe the indescribable? In the last several years, I have read maybe a dozen and a half books on the Shoah and have been greatly impressed by many if not all of them. This narrative though, I feel, is head and shoulders above all of the other personal accounts that I have read thus far. Words to Outlive Us is a fascinating read. This, I feel, can be attributed to three things: the structure of the book(it is divided into six chapters each dealing with a particular aspect of life and death inside the Ghetto), the fascinating and in many cases heartbreaking quality of the accounts and finally, the sheer quantity of unique individual accounts. . While none of these components of the book are unique individually, put together they create an unsurpassed narrative of those Jews, who for no other reason than the fact they were Jews, suffered under the Nazis and in many cases, their Polish neighbors. This compilation is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. It is even more amazing when one takes into account the the fact that many of the narratives were actually penned during the events these individuals were living through and for that matter the immense danger that these survivors placed themselves in simply by writing of their experiences as Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Particularly poignant I felt, were the chapters on the institutions of the Ghetto, the resistance and liberation. Through these accounts the reader is seeing day to day life and tragedies as if he or she is witnessing them personally. The reader is a witness to both the greatest acts of kindness and the most horrific acts of violence which human beings are capable of. This is, I believe, the greatest testament to the power of this collection of personal stories. My only disappointment in this book was that it wasn't double it's 440 pages.

How some fought back and why others could or would not

So often, we read accounts of the Shoah afer the fact. Not to diminish their power, but primary testimony as the events happened, understandably a rarer extant survival, speaks directly and eloquently with a visceral power. The accounts here, by a cross-section of thoughtful, self-deprecating, agonized, and bewildered observers, show why those in the ghetto were so diminished and demoralized.Years of abuse, mental and physical, years of starving and disease and uncertainty wreaked havoc on the Jews in Warsaw. Reading these accounts, you understand how awful were the limited choices between giving in and holding out could both be. Also, what here emerges more fully is the extent to which Jews were exploited with the hopes of work permits, resettlement, visas, and hush money by informers, turncoats, bosses, and those willing or forced to collaborate. The constant anxiety underscores the bodily suffering of the ghetto's inhabitants.Revealed here are the predicaments hundreds of thousands of people like you and me faced, nearly half-a-million crowded into an area the size of Central Park. What often has been distorted into kitsch or melodrama in later re-creations in its original context remains unforgettably eloquent.

For people who want to understand the Holocaust

I read this book after I watched the movie "The Pianist". The true accounts in this book shocked and moved me. By combining with the visual impact from the movie, I am able to relate what I read with what I watched from the movie. After reading the book, I admired the courage, the-will-to-survive, and the brilliance of the Jewish people. I suggest to people who are interested to know what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto, but who has no such background on the holocaust, watched the movie first, then read this book. It is not a dry history book. The acccounts were written by people who have superb writing skill, though they might not know themselves.