Review by Booklist Review
Since 1979, 4,000 survivors of and witnesses to the Holocaust have been videotaped for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Eighteen of them will appear in Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, a documentary that will be shown on PBS in May. This remarkable companion book offers first-person accounts of 27 of the survivors and witnesses. Jewish victims describe expulsion from their homes, forced detention in ghettos, and deportation to concentration camps. Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer writes in a foreword that these witnesses do not appear as heroes or martyrs but as chroniclers of a melancholy and dreadful tale. The survivors express guilt over not having done enough to aid their brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers. These testimonies roughly trace life before, during, and after the Nazi era, beginning in the 1930s; and this important book demonstrates the way in which oral testimony contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. --George Cohen
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Textbooks and historical accounts can provide a broad view of the Holocaust, but nothing can come close to the power of the testimony of those who were there. As Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer writes in his introduction to this collage of first-hand accounts, "Without survivor testimony, the human dimension of the catastrophe would remain a subject of speculation." For more than two decades, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University has been videotaping the oral histories of Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses. This extraordinary project has resulted in a documentary that will air on PBS in April and in this companion book. Editors Greene, a filmmaker, and Kumar, a scholar specializing in ethics and morality in global TV production, have woven together the testimonies of 27 individuals into an unforgettable narrative of the Holocaust: starting with pre-WWII Jewish life, they go on to describe the war's outbreak, ghettos, resistance and hiding, death camps, death marches, liberation and life after the Holocaust. Through careful selection and sequencing, the editors have succeeded in their goal: "to edit without editorializing." These painfully sad testimonies speak for themselves, providing the horrific details of people's experiences. The common link among these speakers is the eternal scars they bear. One survivor concludes his remarks with the haunting words: "I can't tell you everything in an interview. I couldn't even describe one day in the ghetto. I don't want to live with that pain, but it's there. It's there. It forms its own entity and it surfaces whenever it wants to." These voices bring us a step closer to comprehending the lasting anguish of the Nazi genocide. Photos. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A companion volume to both a PBS documentary (scheduled to air in April 2000) and Yale's Fortunoff Archive (www. library.yale.edu/testimonies), this print compilation of the remembrances of 27 Holocaust witnesses is an excellent addition to the literature. The "voices" here range from the Jewish experience to that of non-Jews, American POWs, and resistance fighters. Editors Greene, an award-winning film producer, and Kumar, who teaches graduate seminars on ethics and morality, have wisely chosen to group the narratives chronologically and to edit them only minimally. The results are cohesive and compelling firsthand stories that begin in the 1930s and end with the still very painful memories of today. Many of the individuals in Witness lay bare their emotions, having never before discussed their experiences; hence, this work contrasts with other Holocaust memoirs in which the writers have had time for introspection and editing. Recommended for public and academic library Holocaust collections.--Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A companion volume to the PBS documentary (scheduled for broadcast in May 2000), providing a transcription of 27 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses. The interviewees recorded their testimonies for the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University beginning in 1979. Greene (an award-winning film producer) and Kumar (who conducts 'television ethics' seminars) cut the separate interviews into short passages and presented them over several chronological chapters. A polished and eloquent foreword by Lawrence Langer (English/Simmons Coll.) exhorts us not to romanticize the will or resistance of the survivors, who had a traumatic but distinctly ``unheroic experience.'' The corroboration of the details of particular events (death marches, for example) or general experiences (such as the day-to-day living conditions in the camps) by both survivors and witnesses is remarkable, and it endows the collection with a tremendous historical importance. It is a disappointment, then, to find last names omitted from the credits of the interviewees, as this tends to blunt the otherwise sharp realism of the project as a whole. Furthermore, and for the same reason, the absence of many of the dates and place names is a serious oversight. While some of the split-screen excerpts are jarringly short (one German Jew appears only long enough to say he rooted for Germany in the 1936 Olympics), most of the pieces fit together as a kind of mosaic depicting prewar Europe, the ghettos, life underground, deportations, the camps, the liberation, and (in the last chapter) the after-effects of the war. While most of the reportage is not new, there are important confirmations of anecdotal accounts (of cannibalism among Soviet prisoners, for example), and many of the statements (such as Joseph K.'s description of the ghetto as worse than the camps because ``there was the constant fear of something happening to my family'') offer sharp psychological insights. References allow contributors to be accessed on video and provide extensive lists for further reading on the subject. An important testimony that will refute anyone who denies the reality of the Nazi crimes.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
