Violinist in Auschwitz: From Salonica to Jerusalem, 1913-1967

Jacques Stroumsa: Preface to the English edition The experience acquired in Germany during my lectures at Gymnasia (high schools) in Berlin and neighboring Potsdam in 1993 and 1994 gave me a number of important insights which I would like to share with the Eng1ish-speaking public. The Nazi concentration camps were intended to completely destroy the human personality and to reduce it to a number tattooed on the skin, like animals in a slaughterhouse. The questions that people asked were, for example: having survived physically after being in Auschwitz and Mauthausen for two years, having survived the terrible Death March in January 1945, how did you find the strength to be a human being again; how did you adjust to living in a normal society again? Above all, where did you find the strength to come back to Germany (the land where crime was so scientifically organized) and, day after day, tell young Germans the details of your sufferings? How could you tell them that the younger generation is not guilty, that they and their parents (who are now the same age as my children) were not even born at the time when these events occurred? The answers to these anguished questions were given to me by the children themselves; they were deeply moved by my lectures.