Celebrated on April 19 (the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is simple yet immeasurably important in intent: A single day spent reflecting on the approximately 6 million men, women, and children systematically exterminated by the Nazi machine so that we, as human beings and members of a supposedly civilized society, will never again descend into the depths of such abject evil.

One can only assume that for Holocaust survivors, Jews and non-Jews alike, Yom Hashoah is something of a daily ritual. Can anyone of us even conceive of a single day passing without the terrifying recollection of your mother being dragged off by a Nazi soldier while you stood there, a confused and frightened 6-year-old facing an all-but-certain death? And though some survivors choose to relegate the indescribably painful memories of the past to the deepest, darkest corners of their minds, the Holocaust is an inescapable, factual, tangible truth.

There are some survivors, however, who refuse to live in secret silence. They want, or perhaps more appropriately, need, to give their memories a voice, to tell their stories. And so, in honor of those Holocaust survivors who chose to record their memories and thoughts as both a tool of catharsis and education --- and, by extension, in recognition of all those, both living and dead, who were forced to bear witness to humanity's darkest hour --- Bookreporter.com has compiled a selection of new and notable memoirs and diaries.

I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945, Volume 2
Victor Klemperer
Modern Library
ISBN: 0375756973
The son of a rabbi, a German patriot who served in WW1, and a professor of Romance Languages at the Dresden Technical Institute, Victor Klemperer married a Christian and converted to Protestantism. All this, save the son of a rabbi profile, meant precious little in 1942, the year of the Final Solution.

Once spared deportation because he was married to an Aryan, the second volume of Klemperer's diary (the first, also titled I WILL BEAR WITNESS, spanned the years 1933 to 1941) begins with sharp and meticulous reports of the Third Reich's full-force crusade against the Jews. Now subject to the Gestapo's night raids, and finally forced into a labor camp, Klemperer eventually resigns himself to the inevitability of death at the hands of the Nazi's. Yet he and his wife are saved by the great Dresden air raid of February 13, 1945, as they find their way to Allied lines.

Lauded as a work that is destined to be spoken of in the same breath as THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK and Elie Wiesel's NIGHT, I WILL BEAR WITNESS is, at once, mesmerizing and appalling.

 
LAST TRAIN FROM BERLIN: An Eye Witness Account of Germany at War
Howard K. Smith
Phoenix Press
ISBN: 1842122142
Renowned journalist Howard K. Smith spent several years reporting for the United Press in Germany during the beginning stages of Hitler's rise to power. Of course, the fanatically stringent German censors refused to let the majority of his findings/writing reach America, so it wasn't until Smith escaped to Switzerland in 1941 that he was able to freely speak and write about his experiences --- LAST TRAIN FROM BERLIN was published soon thereafter.

An eyewitness account of the shocking and terrifying events leading up to the Holocaust, LAST TRAIN FROM BERLIN focuses on the psychological, emotional and physical manipulation of the German people --- Jewish and Christian, alike --- at the hands of Hitler, Goebbels, and their yes-men.

 
DIARY OF A MAN IN DESPAIR
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen
Duckworth Publishers
ISBN: 0715630008
"The real importance of the book [is] that a man who stood solidly on the soil of Bavaria looked on as millions of his fellow countrymen became automatons, moving and yelling and salivating to order, and set down what it was to be a full human being among these walking machines."

First published in Germany in 1947, Reck's "non-fiction masterpiece about the comprehension of evil" is a true and significant living history of Nazi Germany. Born into the Prussian aristocracy, an intellectual and great Bavarian patriot, Reck recorded his thoughts about Germany's descent into evil and chaos at the hands of the Nazi's. October 1944 marks Reck's last diary entry as he was arrested --- the following February he was murdered at Dachau.

DISPLACED PERSONS: Growing Up American After the Holocaust
Joseph Berger
Scribner
ISBN: 068485757X
A survivor's tale in its own right, in which Joseph Berger --- a veteran reporter for The New York Times --- reflects on the immigrant experience precipitated and inescapably shadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust. A Polish-Jewish boy living with his parents in New York in the 1940s, Berger's childhood remembrances illuminate the challenge of integrating the dual worlds of the "displaced person" growing up in America after the Holocaust --- the safe yet unfamiliar land of opportunity vs. an unwelcoming homeland forever associated with unimaginable loss and atrocity. Marked by the kind of honest but not overly sentimental prose characteristic of a journalist, DISPLACED PERSONS is a long overdue testament to the precarious and extraordinarily courageous existence of the 140,000 refugees that escaped to the United States between 1946 and 1953.

 
WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust
edited by Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar
The Free Press
ISBN: 0684865254
In association with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, WITNESS: Voices from the Holocaust brings together some of the more than 10,000 hours of videotaped oral histories from Holocaust survivors. The book is a companion to an acclaimed documentary that aired nationally on PBS.

The collection includes testimonies from an enormous cross-section of Holocaust survivors, including Jews, Hitler Youths, American POWs, priests, and Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters. Together, they provide a seamless and expansive look at the Nazi regime and all its megalomaniac horrors before, during, and after the war.

 
AN UNCOMMON FRIENDSHIP: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust
Bernat Rosner and Frederic C. Tubach with Sally Patterson Tubach
University of California Press
ISBN: 0520225317
In 1944, while Fritz Tubach, the son of a German Nazi army officer, was preparing to join the Hitler Youth movement, Hungarian-born Bernie Rosner and his family were being loaded onto a train bound for Auschwitz. With childhood experiences so diametrically opposed, it seems nothing short of a divine act of goodwill that many years later these two men would meet and become close friends.

Told in a counterpoint memoir style, the stories these two men offer of their youths, set against a backdrop of unmitigated evil, are utterly divergent. Yet, once in America and afforded a never-known personal freedom, their paths toward personal rebirth become surprisingly intertwined and profoundly beautiful.

 
FLARES OF MEMORY: Stories of Children During the Holocaust
edited by Anita Brostoff with Sheila Chamovitz
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195138716
Arranged both chronologically and thematically (specifically, divided into 10 sections with headings ranging from "The Lottery of Life and Death" to "Emergence Into Light"), this collection of writings was brought to life during a series of survivor writing workshops at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. Each vignette is a vivid invocation of a childhood lost to pain, terror, and humiliation. The "message" pervasive throughout FLARES OF MEMORY is not, however, one of hate. Rather, these testimonies bear witness to "the most cruel mistakes of European civilization during the Holocaust so that future generations will never be part of such atrocities."

--- Lazarus Penultimate