DC Public Library System

After the Holocaust the bells still ring, Joseph Polak ; foreword by Elie Wiesel

eng

autobiography

portraits

no index present

non fiction

After the Holocaust the bells still ring

891324301

Joseph Polak ; foreword by Elie Wiesel

"This memoir is a fascinating portrait of mother and child who miraculously survive two concentration camps, then, after the war, battle demons of the past, societal rejection, disbelief, and invalidation as they struggle to reenter the world of the living. It is the tale of how one newly takes on the world, having lived in the midst of corpses strewn about in the scores of thousands, and how one can possibly resume life in the aftermath of such experiences. It is the story of the child who decides, upon growing up, that the only career that makes sense for him in light of these years of horror is to become someone sensitive to the deepest flaws of humanity, a teacher of God's role in history amidst the traditions that attempt to understand it--and to become a rabbi. Readers will not emerge unscathed from this searing work, written by a distinguished, Boston-based rabbi and academic"--, Provided by publisher

Prologue -- Introduction -- Book One -- Percussion (In which the author puports to describe the first attempt by the Nazi machine in The Hague, Netherlands, to deport him (at the time, a fetus), together with his mother and his father, to the East) -- Tanya (In which the author contemplates whether it might have been better not to have been born) -- Who's Going on Tuesday? : Westerbork (In which the author attempts to describe the conditions of his internment while still an infant in Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp, through which over a hundred thousand Dutch Jews passed on their way East) -- Bergen-Belsen (In which the author, deported as a toddler (with family still intact) from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen on February 1, 1944, considers the interaction of life and death in this place) -- The Lost Transport (In which the author considers his journey from Bergen- Belsen to Theresienstadt in April, 1945, his liberation from the Nazis, the death of his father, his separation from his mother, and his adoption by a Dutch-Jewish family) -- Mother, Father, and Other Unfinished Business (In which the author juxtaposes the lives of his parents who, in his memory, were never together) -- Book Two: After the Holocaust -- The Bijenkorf (In which the author considers the joy of living after the Holocaust) -- After the Holocaust, the Holocaust Continues (In which the author describes the grip the Holocaust had on those of its victims that survived) -- The Holocaust in Canada (Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose) -- The Last Witness (Who is left to remember the Holocaust?) -- Epilogue