On The Bookshelf

SHOAH from page 70

Memoirs Wanted

`The Last Album'

New project seeks unpub-
lished Holocaust testimonies.

I

SANDEE BRAWARSKY

Special to the Jewish News

A

lthough new Holocaust
memoirs are published every
year, many more are turned down
for publication by publishers who
say the market is saturated. Other
memoirs exist as diaries on tissue-
thin paper, stored for years in the
backs of drawers, and still many
others are not yet on paper.
In a major initiative spearhead-
ed by Nobel prize laureate Elie
Wiesel, unpublished Holocaust
testimonies — whether short
accounts or books — will be col-
lected and published. A project of
the World Jewish Congress, the
Holocaust Survivors' Memorial
Project recently received a pledge
of $1 million from Random
House to begin its work.
Wiesel serves as honorary chair-
man, and Menachem Rosensaft, a
lawyer, poet and activist, is direc-
tor and editor-in-chief of the proj-
ect.
We have done injustice to sur-
vivors who want to tell their
story," Wiesel, who has been
working for years to bring this
project to fruition, says. "In the
beginning no one listened. This is
something so sacred. We have no
right not to do it."
Rosensaft says that their first
priority is to reach out to sur-
vivors and their children to collect
manuscripts. Secondly, they'll
work with institutions like Yad
Vashem in Israel and the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, which have manu-
scripts in their archives.
Wiesel and Rosensaft emphasize
that the Random House funding
is a first step. When asked how
much additional funding the proj-
ect will need, Wiesel suggests $10
million. Their hope is that the
first books will be published by
the end of 2001. H

Manuscripts can be sent to the
Holocaust Survivors' Memoirs
Project, World Jewish Congress,
501 Madison Ave., New York,
NY 10022.

4/13
2001

72

f memories form a circle around
the heart, as S.Y. Agnon writes in
Betrothed, then photographs uphold
that circle.
Many of the people whose photo-
graphs appear in The Last Album: Eyes

from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau
by Ann Weiss (Norton; $39.95) are
smiling. Almost all look directly at the
camera, with a certain confident, con-
tent and hopeful gaze. The book has
the feel of someone else's family album
the people almost look familiar.
Among the
400 photo-
graphs are
vacation
scenes, cou-
ples dancing,
tables set
with lace
tablecloths,
wedding
receptions,
class outings
and school-
room poses, Purim festivities, families
with pianos as backgrounds, formal
portraits, small girls with big bows in
their hair, in 1930s style.
Some are the work of photographic
studios, but most are amateur snap-
shots. Most were taken in Poland, but
several were sent to Polish relatives from
then Palestine, Germany and other
places. All were carried to Auschwitz.
The Last Album is a very different
work than photo collections of prewar
Europe by noted photographers like
Roman Vishniac or Alter Kacyzne.
Vishniac's and Kacyzne's works reflect
the photographer's individual vision.
The power of the photographs in
this new book has less to do with their
sense of composition or artistic value
than with the reason that they were
brought to Auschwitz in the first
place. For the prisoners, these are the
images of loved ones they wanted to
remember as they were taken to an
unknown destination and fate. The
photos were the embracing circles
around their hearts.
Weiss, a researcher, documentary
filmmaker and educator who is the
daughter of Holocaust survivors from
Poland, made a short film using these
images, Eyes From the Ashes, which she
showed at the First International
Conference of Children of Holocaust
Survivors in Jerusalem in 1988.
Along with the film, she also
arranged a traveling exhibition with a
selection of photographs.
A survivor from Bendin living in

S FROM 134E ASKES OF
USCHNIPT2•311MENAU

Israel, whom she found through a
woman in Detroit, is, in fact, in a
number of them. When he saw the
images of his family and friends, he -
told Weiss that he could now die a
rich man, that he could finally show
his family the world he comes from.

— Sandee Brawarsky

`Hiding Places'

T

he hiding places in the title of
Daniel Asa Rose's memoir, Hiding

Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace
Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust
(Simon & Schuster; S25), refer to the
haylofts and cellars where his relatives
hid from the Nazis during the war
years, and also to the suburban tool
sheds and coat closets which the author
crawled into during his childhood in a
mostly gentile Connecticut town.
The title also alludes to the author's
efforts to avoid his Judaism. Traveling to
Europe to find his family's hiding places
in Belgium and France with his two
young sons, Rose
comes to see that
hiding places are
"not merely dark
holes of conceal-
ment," but also
TTIDINci PLACE'S
"places of revela-
tion." The trip leads
him to understand
the links between
present and past, his
own connections to
his family's past and to the Jewish future.
It is the account of a trip more than
12 years ago when he was recently
divorced and his now grown-up sons
were 12 and 7.
The story of their adventures — from
scant clues they manage to track down
many of the places they seek — is inter-
woven, in alternate chapters, with the
author's reminiscences of growing up.
Rose explains that it took him 10 years
to write the book because it was such a
"massive undertaking, dealing with my
forebears, my children, my religion."
It took him considerable time to
find the right voice, one that captured
the irreverence of his children and was
still respectful toward the Holocaust.
"I had to lighten it for a new gener-
ation, while at the same time pay
homage," Rose, a novelist, essayist and
travel writer says.
He explains that the trip was also a
kind of atonement, for the years spent
mimicking his stuttering relatives who
survived Hitler's Europe.
Rose writes well, with wit and humor
and attention to telling details. And

from the very beginning readers learn
that Hiding Places is no ordinary mem-
oir. In an author's note, he explains that
he has "taken pains to tidy and pace the
narrative, to conflate some of the char-
acters in order to lend focus to the
structure, and occasionally to imagine
details in an effort to convey the deep-
est sense of the sagas recounted herein."
Although he sticks strictly to the facts
when it comes to details of the
Holocaust, his other accounts are
admittedly not literal. He sees the book
as on the "cutting edge, expanding the
notions of what nonfiction is, redefin-
ing what the memoir is."

— Sandee Brawarsky

`Test Of Courage'

A

week before Kristallnacht, Michel
Thomas and his girlfriend were
captured by Gestapo officers who said
they would be taken to Dachau. But
then the officers turned their backs and
let them run for the French border.
They never knew whether the officers
were more interested in the party they
were heading to and didn't want to be
bothered with young Jews, or were per-
suaded by Thomas' arguments, or per-
haps had a streak of human decency.
This was one of many near-escapes in
Thomas' eventful wartime experience:
Born in Poland and educated in
Germany and Austria, he was interned
in concentration
and deportation
camps in France,
TE ST of
later served as a
COURAGE
French resistance
fighter and outwit-
ted Klaus Barbie,
joined the
American forces
when France was
liberated and was
with the troops
that liberated Dachau, served as a Nazi
hunter and worked in U.S. intelligence
and counter-intelligence after the war.
His epic story is chronicled in Test of

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Courage: The Michel Thomas Story —
One Man's Heroic WWII Journey from
Survival to Triumph, written by British
journalist Christopher Robbins (Free
Press; $27.50).
Thomas, who lives in Manhattan, is
now an internationally known language
teacher with schools in New York and
Beverly Hills.
He is portrayed as a man of enor-
mous courage, self-reliance and resilien-
cy; with principled determination. Of
his extended family, he is the only one
to have survived.

