Their Image Will be Forever Before My Eyes: Experiences of a Jewish Girl of the Dutch Diaspora During the Holocaust

Yehudit Ilan-Onderṿaizer

jan 2003 · Gefen Publishing House Ltd

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Yehudit Ilan, author of Their Image Will Be Forever Before My Eyes, was just seven years old when the Germans occupied Holland in 1940. She lived, together with her family, in the same neighborhood of Amsterdam as Anne Frank. Whereas Anne Frank went into hiding, and met a tragic end in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Yehudit Ilan, also imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen, somehow survived, and has recorded her vivid impressions of those terrible days in her gripping memoirs. From pre-war Amsterdam, where the Jewish community thrived, to the darkest days of the war, in 1943, when Yehudit and her family were transported to Westerbork, and then to Bergen-Belsen, to Yehudit's grueling journey home after the German defeat, to her new life in the fledgling State of Israel, where Yehudit met her husband and raised her family - these memoirs are both Yehudit's personal story, and also a legacy to the millions who did not survive the brutal Nazi regime. As a teacher herself, Yehudit Ilan appreciates well the importance of remembering the Holocaust. As she writes, in Their Image Will Be Forever Before My Eyes, "Even though, from an historical point of view, the main purpose of telling about the Holocaust should be to describe the whole picture, it is well known that this is and will be impossible forever, since the human mind is not capable of comprehending such an enormity of sorrow and suffering. However, it is possible to identify with the grief and suffering of one individual. Through this process, an understanding of the unprecedented tragedy of an entire people will be achieved." Following the publication of the first edition of her memoirs, Yehudit Ilan has frequently been asked to relate her tragic experiences in war-torn Europe. Her history, so eloquently and lucidly told in Their Image Will Be Forever Before My Eyes, is a significant contribution to the memory of the Holocaust, and an important insight into the ways in which children in particular coped in such grave and desperate circumstances.