cover image Echoes from the Holocaust: Memoir

Echoes from the Holocaust: Memoir

Mira Ryczke Kimmelman. University of Tennessee Press, $18.95 (200pp) ISBN 978-0-87049-956-2

In 1939, 16-year-old Mira Ryczke was forced by Nazi troops to leave her childhood home in Poland for an uncertain future. In the next five and a half years, Ryczke, through the support of others, memories of her family and sheer luck, survived the Warsaw ghetto, three concentration camps and a death march. Her memoir is simply written and unflinchingly detailed: she recounts being tattooed for identification purposes; waking up in a freezing bunk to touch the cold hand of the girl next to her, who had died during the night; ""composing"" herself as she attempted to look strong enough to avoid being ""selected for death."" Ryczke (she married a fellow survivor, Max Kimmelman, in Bavaria and immigrated with him to the United States) decided to recount her life because the ""dead cannot speak: they cannot be witnesses to the unspeakable horrors. I am their witness, and my years are numbered. I have to do it for them."" (Nov.)