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| Am I a Murderer? : Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman
ISBN: 9780429700866
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Taylor & Francis Group
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: History;
Hoping his uniform would provide a shield for his family, Perechodnik, a 27-year-old engineer of agronomy, joined the ghetto police in the Polish town of Otwock during WWII only to find himself participating in the Germans' August 1941 extermination of Jews, including his wife and two-year-old daughter. The author watched helplessly as they were forced aboard a train bound for the Treblinka death camp. In this stunning memoir, written in hiding in Warsaw after he left the police, he expresses his anguish and astonishment at the savagery of the Poles who turned against the Jews. It was, he writes, ``the greatest disillusionment that I have endured in my life.'' Perechodnik committed suicide by taking cyanide in 1944, shortly after the abortive Warsaw Uprising against the Germans, leaving this blistering record of the implementation of the Final Solution by a witness, victim and collaborator. Before his death, he entrusted his diary to a friend, and it eventually found its way to the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem. Fox, who edited this testament, teaches history in Britain. Illustrated. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Calel Perechodnik In this moving memoir, a young Polish Jew chronicles his life under the Nazis. In the vain hope of protecting himself and his family, Calel Perechodnik made the wrenching decision to become a ghetto policeman in a small town near Warsaw. The true tragedy of his choice becomes clear when during the Aktion he must witness his own wife and child forced to board a train to the Treblinka extermination camp. Filled with loathing for the Germans, the Poles, his Jewish brethren, and himself, Perechodnik fled the ghetto to shelter with a Polish woman in Warsaw. In the course of 105 terror-filled days in hiding, he poured out his poignant story. Shortly before his death in 1944, he entrusted the precious diary to a Polish friend. The document was eventually deposited in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. Left nearly forgotten for half a century, it was finally published in Poland in 1993. |
