Vanished City: Everyday Life in the Warsaw Ghetto

Transported from the Warsaw Ghetto in September 1942, and bound for the Treblinka extermination camp, Mazor escaped from a cattle car. His wife fled from the ghetto a month earlier by climbing a cemetery wall. Their dramatic escapes are described in this valuable memoir. Originally published in French in 1955, the book poignantly evokes the moral climate of the Warsaw Ghetto, ``a state of feverish hopelessness coupled, despite everything, with a faith in liberation.'' Mazor, a Russian Jewish lawyer who emigrated to Poland after the Bolshevik revolution, moved to Paris at the end of WW II and died in the 1970s. He charges that the Warsaw Ghetto's Judenrat (German-appointed Jewish council) refused to take those measures that were within its powers to alleviate the misery of the ghetto's inhabitants. Providing a moving picture of the ghetto's convulsive day-to-day existence, he analyzes its social structure and documents the activities of its tenement committees, political parties and relief organizations. (Aug.)