Echoes from the Holocaust
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Mira Ryczke Kimmelman.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press; Univ of Tennessee Pr
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Knoxville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 176
Subjects: Kimmelman, Mira Ryczke, 1923-; Jews -- Poland -- Gdańsk -- Biography.; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Poland -- Personal narratives.; Holocaust survivors -- United States -- Biography.
Description: The daughter of a Jewish seed exporter, the author was born Mira Ryczke in 1923 in a suburb of the Baltic seaport of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Her childhood was happy, and she learned to cherish her faith and heritage. Through the 1930s, Mira's family remained in the Danzig area despite a changing political climate that was compelling many friends and neighbors to leave. With the Polish capitulation to Germany in the autumn of 1939, however, Mira and her family were forced from their home.

In calm, straightforward prose - which makes her story all the more harrowing - Kimmelman recalls the horrors that befell her and those she loved. Sent to Auschwitz in 1944, she escaped the gas chambers by being selected for slave labor. Finally, as the tide of war turned against Germany, Mira was among those transported to Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands were dying from starvation, disease, and exposure. In April 1945, British troops liberated the camp, and Mira was eventually reunited with her father.

Most of the other members of her family had perished. In the closing chapters, Kimmelman describes her marriage, her subsequent life in the United States, and her visits to Israel and to the places in Europe where the events of her youth transpired.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Life in Danzig; title: Warsaw; title: Next stop : Tomaszow Mazowiecki; title: Tomaszow Ghetto; title: Bloody April 1942; title: The watch; title: Purim 1943; title: Life and death at Blizyn-Majdanek; title: Pinio; title: Choosing life; title: Place called Auschwitz; title: Promise kept; title: Auschwitz-Hindenburg; title: Evacuation and death march; title: Bergen-Belsen; title: Liberation; title: Memories of my brother; title: Eva; title: New life-new love; title: Coming to the United States; title: Closing the circle.