The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir

If you're looking for a Holocaust story, this isn't the book for you. The title says it all: the author is writing about life BEFORE the Holocaust, and he devotes only a few pages to his family's fate once the Nazis showed up. (He was the only survivor in his large family, and went on to become a rabbi.) Most memoirs are just the opposite: maybe a chapter or so about pre-war life, then a long history of the war years, then a concluding chapter about life after liberation.

I found this book very valuable because it gives a detailed glimpse of the Hassidic Jewry of Poland: a society vastly different from our own, a society we will never know again, which existed for centuries before being wiped out by World War II. The way Gold described show more that time and place, I felt like I was actually there, and I saw exactly what was destroyed when the Nazis invaded Poland.

I could also see in his descriptions reasons why the Jews had such a hard time resisting and escaping from the Nazis. Polish Jews were a peaceful, long-suffering lot, used to centuries of pogroms, and it was always their habit to just keep their heads down and endure until things got better. Who was to know that this time was different? And if a Jew wanted to escape, he had a hard time of it, especially the Hassidic Jews. Gold points out that Hassidic Jews had a much higher Holocaust mortality rate than assimilated Jews. Hassids in particular had always kept apart from the gentile population, living in their own neighborhoods, going to their own schools. Many of them didn't even speak Polish, and of course flawed Polish or a Yiddish accent would be a dead giveaway. A lot of them didn't know very many gentiles, certainly not intimately. To hide you usually needed a gentile's help, and who could you turn to that you knew you could trust? Also, from what Gold says, the Hassidic Jewish population tended to be very poor, lacking the resources to bribe their way to safety, purchase false papers, etc.

I would recommend this to novelists who want to write about that period, and also as a supplement to the bigger Holocaust collections. It would probably also interest people who are just curious about Judaism in general. show less