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

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

Award-winning history author Anthony S. Pitch takes this plea to heart and presents survivors’ true accounts in his new work, In Their Own Words , to remind readers of the horrors that took place so they may never happen again.

There are a wide variety of events and life circumstances among the over 400 compelling narratives. A GI who liberated Buchenwald said it was worse than a dream as he walked around like inmates “in a trance.” With their hair shaved off sisters standing side by side could not recognize each other. The tattooed number on a woman’s arm was thought by Texans, after the war, to be a reminder of a good time at a summer camp.

In Their Own Words is directed at a new generation, too untutored to know much of anything about the Holocaust. It will surely add to the perspective of others who may regard the Holocaust as a remote and distant happening, too far removed from our modern age to have relevance.

These are the words of those who knew. They lived it. They endured it. They saw it. And they survived it.