American Congress of Jews from Poland and Survivors of Concentration Camps – Holocaust Documentation Committee “Remember”, Los Angeles, California. Giant photo album [46×30 cm] documenting the tragedy of Jewish children in the ghettos of Poland and their deportation to the death camps. The album pages are made of thick cardboard and spiral-bound. Includes an introduction by Benjamin Gray, Chairman of the Holocaust Documentation Committee. Published by the Holocaust Documentation Committee, Los Angeles, postwar 1940s. Extremely rare.
An album of harsh photos, difficult to view, documenting the suffering, starvation, and struggle for survival of children in the ghettos, the deportation of children to the death camps, and finally, photographs of children who survived the inferno. Each photograph is captioned in English at the bottom.
Photographs include: starved children in the Warsaw Ghetto; welfare organizations in the Warsaw Ghetto distributing food rations to children; a Jewish boy caught by a German guard while attempting to smuggle food into the ghetto; a Jewish orphanage in occupied Paris; starving children in the Łódź Ghetto; children working in a ghetto workshop; a Jewish boy hiding in fear of deportation; a children’s labor workshop in the Vilna Ghetto; children in the Łódź Ghetto searching for coal remnants; children working in a knitting factory in the Łódź Ghetto; children from the “sanitation commando” cleaning sewers in the Łódź Ghetto; a boy feeding his younger sister; a young singer in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto; yeshiva students under harsh conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto; children sprawled in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto; children deported from the Kraków Ghetto; Jewish children rescued by the Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto after its liquidation, selling cigarettes and newspapers; an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto; children in a forest near the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau; on the way to the gas chambers in Auschwitz; Jews who had just disembarked from the train in Auschwitz before the selection; children deported from the Łódź Ghetto to the Chełmno extermination camp in 1942; children who hid with partisans in the forests. Also included are post-liberation photographs – an Auschwitz survivor girl horrifically emaciated during a medical examination, children who survived in an orphanage in Belgium after the war, and more.
The album was published in the United States for educational purposes, aiming to inform the younger generation about the horrors inflicted upon children like themselves during the years of torment:”The youth of today were born after World War II. A new generation has arisen—one that knows of the suffering of European Jewry only by hearsay. Just as it was difficult for tens of thousands of Jews who lived safely outside the Nazi-occupied zones to believe that entire Jewish communities had been brutally destroyed and a people annihilated, it is even harder for the new generation to comprehend the depth and scale of this immense tragedy, unparalleled in human history… In our schools, the Holocaust must become an integral part of the regular curriculum, a text developed by a committee of historians and educators. And in every synagogue, there must be a permanent memorial light…” (from the foreword by Dr. Juda Pilch).
Extremely rare. Not listed in the WorldCat global library catalog.
[59] leaves. 46×30 cm. Minor stains on the cover. Good – very good condition.
