Echoes from the Holocaust
A Memoir
Mira Ryczke Kimmelman
"During the most difficult times of World War II," Mira Kimmelman
writes, "I wondered whether the world really knew what was
happening to us. I lived in total isolation, not knowing what was
taking place outside the ghetto gates, outside the barbed wires of
concentration camps. After the war, would anyone ever believe my
experiences?"
Kimmelman had no way of preserving her experiences on paper while
they happened, but she trained herself to remember. And now, as a
survivor of the Holocaust, she has preserved her recollections for
posterity in this powerful and moving book--one woman's personal
perspective on a terrible moment in human history.
The daughter of a Jewish seed exporter, the author was born Mira
Ryczke in 1923 in a suburb of the Baltic seaport of Danzig (now
Gdansk, Poland). Her childhood was happy, and she learned to
cherish her faith and heritage. Through the 1930s, Mira's family
remained in the Danzig area despite a changing political climate
that was compelling many friends and neighbors to leave. With the
Polish capitulation to Germany in the autumn of 1939, however, Mira
and her family were forced from their home. In calm,
straightforward prose--which makes her story all the more
harrowing--Kimmelman recalls the horrors that befell her and those
she loved. Sent to Auschwitz in 1944, she escaped the gas chambers
by being selected for slave labor. Finally, as the tide of war
turned against Germany, Mira was among those transported to
Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands were dying from starvation,
disease, and exposure. In April 1945, British troops liberated the
camp, and Mira was eventually reunited with her father. Most of the
other members of her family had perished.
In the closing chapters, Kimmelman describes her marriage, her
subsequent life in the United States, and her visits to Israel and
to the places in Europe where the events of her youth transpired.
Even when confronted with the worst in humankind, she observes, she
never lost hope or succumbed to despair. She concludes with an
eloquent reminder: "If future generations fail to protect the
truth, it vanishes. . . . Only by remembering the bitter lesson of
Hitler's legacy can we hope it will never be repeated. Teach it,
tell it, read it."
The Author: Mira Ryczke Kimmelman is a resident of Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, and lectures widely in schools about her experiences
during the Holocaust.
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