In 1946, a Russian-born American psychologist named David P. Boder toured displaced-persons camps throughout Western Europe, interviewing victims of the Nazi terror, most of them Jews. His published reports were not widely circulated, writes editor Donald Niewyk, and in any event few people wanted to talk or hear about the Holocaust so soon after it had ended. With the passage of half a century and the passing of the generation of Shoah, Boder's reports, collected in Fresh Wounds, stand as valuable documents in the world's memory. His interviewees talk about their years in slavery, of disease and death, and of the daily work of living with their Nazi captors. Many of the interviewees went on to live in the United States, and in Israel, where they founded kibbutzim.


From Booklist
In 1946 psychologist David Boder interviewed 109 Holocaust survivors in displaced-persons camps in Europe. Fresh Wounds presents 36 of these interviews, which had been stored in the Library of Congress. Boder, a Russian Jew, taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and died in 1961. His taped interviews involved survivors from Poland (23), Lithuania (1), Germany (5), France (3), Slovakia (2), and Hungary (2). They tell of brutal roundups of the Jews, daily torment in slave labor and concentration camps, hiding to evade deportations, bold escapes, revolts and uprisings, Nazi manipulation of the Jews' psychological vulnerability, mass shootings, exploitation, the barter economy and social life in the ghettos, and painful separation from loved ones. Niewyk, a writer and history professor, has written an informative introduction, explaining his editing objectives and offering a broad overview of the Holocaust, fitting the interviews into the big picture. Fresh Wounds reveals the victims' devastating experiences of pain, loss, and humiliation with compelling authenticity. George ^ICohen

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Every student of the Holocaust knows the crucial importance of survivors' testimonies in reconstructing the crime. Most such accounts, however, were recorded years or even decades after the end of World War II. The survivor narratives that make up this volume, in contrast, were gathered immediately after the war. In 1946, Russian-born American psychologist David P. Boder interviewed 109 victims of Nazi persecution - the majority of them Jews - in "Displaced Persons" camps across Europe. These interviews encompass survivors from Poland, Lithuania, Germany, France, Slovakia, and Hungary, ranging in age from their early teens to their 70s. Their stories shed light on such controversial subjects as relations between Jews and neighbors or strangers who extended or withheld aid, opportunities for and obstacles to Jewish resistance, the behavior and attitudes of the perpetrators, the victims' knowledge - or lack of knowledge - about the fate that awaited them in Nazi hands, survival strategies, women's experience of the Holocaust, the Nazi practice of placing prisoners in charge of their fellow inmates, and the liberators' postwar treatment of freed concentration camp inmates.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charles W. Sydnor