Our Crime Was Being Jewish: Hundreds of Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories

Anthony S. Pitch

Abr 2015 · Ibinebenta ng Simon and Schuster

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In the shouted words of a woman bound for Auschwitz to a man about to escape from a cattle car, “If you get out, maybe you can tell the story! Who else will tell it?”

Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured. The recollections are from the start of the war—the home invasions, the Gestapo busts, and the ghettos—as well as the daily hell of the concentration camps and what actually happened inside.

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and this hefty collection of stories told by its survivors is one of the most important books of our time. It was compiled by award-winning author Anthony S. Pitch, who worked with sources such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to get survivors’ stories compiled together and to supplement them with images from the war. These memories must be told and held onto so what happened is documented; so the lives of those who perished are not forgotten—so history does not repeat itself.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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Anthony S. Pitch is the award-winning author of several books, including “They Have Killed Papa Dead!” on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He has spoken about Lincoln numerous times in Ford’s Theatre and has been invited to lecture in the Library of Congress and Capitol building, as well as by the Smithsonian Institution, Brookings Institution, National Archives, White House Historical Association, and MIT. He has been featured on C-SPAN, the History Channel, National Geographic TV, Book TV, NPR, and PBS; was an Associated Press broadcast news editor in Philadelphia and staffer in London; has reported from Israel and in Africa; and was a senior writer in the books division of U.S. News & World Report. He lives in Potomac, Maryland.

Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher who works on the conceptual development of museums and the development of historical films. From 1988 through 1993, he served as project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation. He also served as a historical consultant for HBO’s Conspiracy, NBC’s Uprising, and The History Channel’s The Holocaust: The Untold Story. Berenbaum is the author and editor of hundreds of journalistic pieces, scores of scholarly articles, and twenty books including After Tragedy and Triumph and The World Must Know. He is currently the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University, where he is also a professor of Jewish Studies.