Lest We Forget

Growing up in Nazi Leipzig, 1933 to 1939.

Rabbi Shlomo Wahrman writes as a boy who lived those six years inside Germany, in the stretch before the deportations, when Jewish life in Leipzig was being dismantled piece by piece while ordinary childhood carried on around it. That vantage point is what makes the book unusual: most Holocaust literature begins later, and the years of gradual strangulation are the ones least often described from inside.

Because it is a memoir rather than a history, the detail is domestic and specific, and that is what makes it land with readers who find survey histories hard to absorb. It is a book to hand to a teenager who has been taught the period as dates and numbers, and one that adult readers of Holocaust memoir will not have encountered elsewhere.

170 pages, hardcover, 6 by 9 inches, published by ArtScroll Mesorah Publications. It belongs on a shelf with other survivor accounts and in the hands of a family that wants its children to have read testimony rather than summary.

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