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a Polish rabbi's witness of the Shoah and survival
"Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne's memoir as a work of "bitter truth" that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne's original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland. Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant's pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor's guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne's firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century's greatest tragedy"--
"Can These Bones Live? is an exemplary example of a Polish Holocaust survivor's memoir. Published in 1961, the same year as the infamous trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann was held in Jerusalem, Polish scholar and eventual rabbi for the Polish army Leon Thorne added his testimony to a growing collection of survivor histories. His work was unique in its strident focus on calling attention to anti-Semitic violence, both during and after the war throughout Poland. The book received a glowing review from Thorne's contemporary, Isaac Bashevis Singer (who went on to win the 1978 Nobel Prize in literature, and whose own work drew from Polish-Jewish cultural tradition), who described the volume as essential. But in a time period when witness testimony was often discounted, questioned, or ignored, the first part of Thorne's original work was printed by a small publishing house, Bloch, and soon fell out of print and into the public domain. Today, rediscovered memoirs from Polish survivors are proliferating, and interest from scholars has grown as new evidence of Polish war crimes come to light. Historian Dan Magilow has edited the entire memoir, adding an introduction that provides historical backdrop of Jewish Poland before and after World War II and providing a scholarly apparatus that introduces lay readers to unfamiliar terms, places, and references"--
Introduction -- "Out of the Ashes" by Yitzhok Varshavski (Isaac Bashevis Singer), Forverts Newspaper, August 20, 1961 -- Author's Preface -- PT I -- 1. The Cellar -- 2. Schodnica -- 3. Sambor -- 4. An Act of Defiance -- 5. The Storm -- 6. Janover Camp -- 7. Clean Rags for Dirty Ones -- 8. Even the Dead Are Not Immune -- 9. Escape to the Lemberg Ghetto -- 10. In the Ghetto -- 11. Black Thursday -- 12. Despair in the Jewish Quarter -- 13. The Poor Cannot Afford Suicide -- 14. The Situation of the Christians -- 15. In the Shadow of Death -- 16. The Executions -- 17. Last Days of the Sambor Ghetto -- 18. The Last Days of the Drohobycz Ghetto -- 19. The Camp -- 20. Hyrawka -- 21. Why There Was No Resistance -- 22. Naftali Backenroth -- 23. Beginning of the End -- Part II -- 1. August 1944 -- 2. Can These Bones Live? -- 3. A Jewish Chaplain in the Polish Army -- 4. Breslau Revisited -- 5. Fishke, My Rescuer -- 6. A Rabbi at Work -- 7.No. 6 Tannenbaum Street -- 8. The Żydowica's Story -- 9. My Farewell to Poland -- 10. Arrest in Dresden -- 11. Our Return to Poland -- 12. Breslau Again -- 13. The Story of Simon Becker -- 14. A Reunion Aboard a Train -- 15. A Narrow Escape -- 16. Our Second Exodus from Poland -- 17. We Go Free -- Afterword
Includes bibliographical references and index
New Brunswick, New Jersey ; London : Rutgers University Press, 2018