Remembering Survival

Drawing on a rich cache of eye-witness testimony, eminent Holocaust historian Christopher Browning gives us a riveting account of survival in the slave labor camps of Nazi-occupied Poland. Beginning with the German invasion of September 1939 and running through the aftermath of the war and bloody encounters of camp survivors with their Polish neighbors, Browning's harrowing history takes us inside the Nazi forced-labor camps, examining how the many died and how the few managed to survive.

At the start of the story he puts us in the center of the chaos of the market square in Wierzbnik where the Nazis are liquidating the Jewish ghetto, separating those who will survive the event from those to be sent immediately to the death camp at Treblinka. Often these separations cleave families, forcing desparate choices on parents and children. Some of the survivors become forced laborers in the munitions factories of Starachowice, barely housed and fed, suffering endemic typhus and the arbitrary brutalities of the Nazi officers. We see the experiences of the prisoners and their survival strategies change as the war unfolds and the Nazis become more depaendent on these munitions factories, and then again as the Nazis grow desparate with defeat at hand. Browning follows the survivors through their further trials as they attempt to resume their lives in Poland

'Extraordinary and revealing...... .Browning has successfully turned subjective testimony into objective history.' Samuel Moyn, Jewish Review of Books