The aftermath

The events of the Holocaust have been well documented. Almost ninety percent of European Jewry was murdered. But for the survivors, the psychological impact of the Holocaust has stretched beyond 1945. An innocence has been eradicated. A view of their fellow man has been indelibly imprinted: "What did the world learn from the Holocaust?" a survivor was asked. "What the world learned from the Holocaust is that you can kill six million Jews and no one will care.".

The Aftermath offers a perspective of how one who has lived with terror for years is able to avoid paralysis and move forward. It is a book about how people live with gnawing doubts and uncertainty concerning their past actions and inactions, doubts and uncertainties which can cause them to feel ambivalent about their very existence. It is a tale of the anguish they feel because they possess firsthand knowledge of the evil in people, which so unjustly struck and deprived them of what was rightly theirs.

For while Holocaust survivors seem, in most ways, to be like you and me, they are also aware of a subterranean world which may afflict them without warning. It is far easier to extinguish human beings than to extinguish their memories.

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This is also a book about the incredible resilience of human beings. The survivors you will hear from provide observations of how, after being reduced to less than zero during the formative years of adolescence and young adulthood, men and women were able to revive a self-respect which had been under continuous siege.

And because survivors of the Holocaust will soon be gone, this is a unique opportunity to observe a case study of the elasticity of the limits of endurance, and the human need and capacity to reassert a vigorous life. As the mortality of survivors overwhelms them as a group, it may be not only the first but also the final occasion we will have to hear them describe their inner lives.