ePub Poyln: Jewish Life in the Old Country by Alter Kacyzne in History

Description

A generous feat of biographical sleuthing by an acclaimed historian rescues one child victim of the Holocaust from oblivionWhen the German Remembrance Foundation established a prize to commemorate the million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust; it was deliberately named after a victim about whom nothing was known except her age and the date of her deportation: Marion Samuel; an eleven-year-old girl killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Sixty years after her death; when Götz Aly received the award; he was moved to find out whatever he could about Marion's short life and restore this child to history.In what is as much a detective story as a historical reconstruction; Aly; praised for his "formidable research skills" (Christopher Browning); traces the Samuel family's agonizing decline from shop owners to forced laborers to deportees. Against all odds; Aly manages to recover expropriation records; family photographs; and even a trace of Marion's voice in the premonition she confided to a school friend: "People disappear;" she said; "into the tunnel."A gripping account of a family caught in the tightening grip of persecution; Into the Tunnel is a powerful reminder that the millions of Nazi victims were also; each one; an individual life.