Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporary Personal Accounts Book

The huge number of victims of the Holocaust is emotionally incomprehensible. The real horror can only be apprehended on the individual level. In the case of the Holocaust, many such records exist, since, as Ruth Wisse has observed, "many of the Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps . . . showed more concern for preserving a record of the incredible event they were witnessing than for their own survival." The studies presented in this volume survey this evidence--diaries, letters, oral histories, ghetto chronicles, rabbinic works, collections of photographs, songs--that originated in Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, Auschwitz, and elsewhere. Together these documents allow us to gain some inkling of the experience of those who suffered in the ghettos and concentration camps--without the coloration and rethinkings of later recollections.