Country of Ash: A Jewish Doctor in Poland, 1939-1945
by Edward Reicher, Magda Bogin, Elisabeth Bizouard-Reicher
New!:
Poland
"I did not enjoy hearing my father's stories; nor did I like to think back on my own. I was afraid of memory's clarifying power. Can one die again and again? Later, I came to understand that I could not shortchange the past."—Elisabeth Bizouard-Reicher, from the introduction
Country of Ash is the gripping chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story.
Peopled with historical figures like the controversial Chaim Rumkowski, who fancied himself a king of the Jews, to infamous Nazi commanders, to dozens of Jews and non-Jews who played cat and mouse with death throughout the war, Reicher's memoir is about a community faced with extinction and the chance decisions and strokes of luck that kept a few stunned souls alive.
Edward Reicher (1900–1975) served as a critical witness in the Nuremburg Trials and, in 1961, at the Salzburg Tribunal as to Hermann Höfle's role in Operation Reinhard, which sent hundreds of thousands to concentration camps. Country of Ash was published first in French in 1990 thanks to the efforts of his daughter, Elisabeth Bizouard-Reicher. This is the first time his memoir has appeared in English.
Magda Bogin, acclaimed novelist and translator of Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, translated Country of Ash into English.
- Rank: #717699 in Books
- Published on: 2013-04-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
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