Читать книгу The Stories Our Parents Found Too Painful To Tell - Henry R Lew - Страница 11

It might seem strange that the book of Rafael Rajzner’s memoirs, “The Annihilation of Bialystoker Jewry,” is published by the newly formed Bialystoker Centre in Melbourne, Australia.

We originally hoped that the Bialystoker Centre in New York, the largest of its kind in the world, would perform this task. New York greeted Rajzner’s manuscript enthusiastically, thought it worthy of publication, and promised to help pay for it. And then for financial reasons, they regrettably reneged on their offer. The money was needed to house three hundred elderly citizens in their old people’s home instead.

In Melbourne, former Bialystokers found it inconceivable that such a unique and valuable document should not be published.

Rafael Rajzner helped manage the co-operative printing plant, which produced “Undzer Leben,” (Our Life), the largest daily Yiddish newspaper in Bialystok, under the long-standing editorship of the renowned journalist, Pesach Kaplan.

Rajzner lost his wife and his two children to the Nazis. He was interned in the Bialystoker ghetto, imprisoned in the Bialystok Gaol, and transported to numerous concentration camps. During this time he used his intense powers of observation and his phenomenal memory, to store numerous facts relating to many tragic events in exquisite detail. He was driven by an iron will to survive so that he could, one day, inscribe these observations and memories onto paper, and this he began to do immediately after his liberation. He decided not to limit himself to personal experiences, but in the interests of a more total historical picture, also collected eyewitness reports from other surviving Bialystokers.

The most remarkable feature of Rajzner’s writing is that he managed, despite heart breaking and mind numbing experiences, to restrain his feelings and emotions. He doesn’t allow words to exaggerate the gruesome facts he describes. His memorable text is entirely trustworthy.

Abrasha Zbar. (Melbourne 1947).