Preface
The Book After hearing about my father’s life, whether directly from him or indirectly from me, many people have suggested that he write down his story for future generations. To his credit, my father had already gone through the painful process of giving interviews on videotape to Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. But a serious, comprehensive book would lend rigor to the process, as well as incorporate the positive as- pects of my father’s life before and after the War. His life has been defined by many other forces besides the Nazi atrocities. I also wanted to really understand his story, perhaps because a son has an intense need to understand his father; I have always judged myself relative to him and, in view of the sheer amount of life he has lived, always felt somehow shallow. Such a book would also give my fa- ther some degree of immortality which, I think, every son desires for his father. I am now a father myself, with three young children. But I was born and raised in America. I knew that I would never be able to convey to my children the richness of Jewish history that my father could. He has lived through three important historical eras — tra- ditional Jewish life in a town in Poland on the verge of modernity; the mindless horrors of Nazi mass murders; and the rebirth of a Jewish nation in the land promised to our forefathers. I felt a direct visceral connection to these events, but part of me felt like an im- postor or voyeur, talking passionately about things I had not per- sonally experienced. I believed that I could accomplish many goals at once by systematically documenting my father’s personal his- tory: demonstrating that his memories were objectively accurate, juxtaposing his with the intersecting stories of his contemporaries, and identifying the historical context of Eastern Poland, Ukrainian atrocities, and the excitement and challenges of reestablishing a Jewish presence in the land of Israel. I knew that I would learn a lot from this process, and that my father could give future generations the ability to understand these periods in a personal way.
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