cover image When They Came to Take My Father: Voices of the Holocaust

When They Came to Take My Father: Voices of the Holocaust

Mark Seliger. Arcade Publishing, $35 (160pp) ISBN 978-1-55970-305-5

Fifty Jewish men and women who survived the Holocaust--many in concentration camps, others as refugees, or in hiding, or as resistants--relate their experiences in this moving, powerful volume. Their searing first-person accounts, accompanied by black-and-white portrait photographs, tell of families pulverized, of loved ones murdered by the Nazis and of their quiet, determined day-to-day triumph over evil. Polish-born New Jersey builder Sol Urbeck, whose parents perished in the liquidated Krakow ghetto, worked in the Krakow factory supervised by German businessman Oskar Schindler (the focus of Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List). Journalist Ernst Michel, who escaped from Auschwitz in 1945, became the only Holocaust survivor to serve as a reporter at the Nuremburg trials. ``Everybody thinks freedom is something inborn, but it isn't. It is something that has to be taught and experienced,'' declares retired family court judge Gertrud Mainzer, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen. An extraordinary testament to the human spirit, this album includes short, impassioned essays by novelist Anne Roiphe, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, social psychologist Eva Fogelman and others. Kahn is a photo editor; Hager, herself a child of survivors, is an editor at Parents; Seliger is chief photographer for Us and Rolling Stone. (Feb.)