These interviews encompass survivors from Poland, Lithuania,
Germany, France, Slovakia, and Hungary, ranging in age from their
early teens to their seventies. Their remarkable stories shed light
on such controversial subjects as relations between Jews and
neighbors or strangers who extended or withheld aid, opportunities
for and obstacles to Jewish resistance, the victims' knowledge--or
lack of knowledge--about the fate that awaited them in Nazi hands,
survival strategies, women's experience of the Holocaust, the Nazi
practice of placing prisoners in charge of their fellow inmates,
and the liberators' postwar treatment of freed concentration camp
inmates.
In an introduction, Donald Niewyk describes this extraordinary
interviewing project and traces the overwhelming obstacles Boder
faced in finding an audience for the survivor narratives he
collected.