Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto - Brief Article - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2004

Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto. Michal Grynberg, editor. Philip Boehm, translator. Granta Books. [pounds sterling]20.00. 493 pages. ISBN 1-86207-623-5. This moving book, assembled by the Polish historian, Michal Grynberg, was first published in Poland in 1988 and in the U.S.

in 2002. The horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, into which the city's Jews were herded by the Nazis either to die or to be more easily transported to death camps, is one of the last war's more terrible episodes. The ghetto contained an estimated 490,000 people of whom 100,000 died, about 42,500 escaped and 347,500 were sent to the camps. Even during the war, personal, eye-witness accounts were buried and some were discovered after 1945. Whilst Dr. Grynberg provided short introductions to each of the twenty-nine accounts, the translator has also given us a short and valuable introduction. This is a unique, chilling and valuable collection for here we have, for the first time in English, voices not just from history but from beyond the graves of those who suffered.