Jack and Rochelle

Book excerpt: The memoir of a man and woman who escaped into the forest, joined the Jewish partisans—and fell in love—as Hitler laid waste to their Polish hometowns. Jack and Rochelle first met at a youth dance in Poland before the war. They shared one dance, and Jack stepped on Rochelle’s shoes. She was unimpressed. When the Nazis invaded eastern Poland in 1941, both Jack (in the town of Mir) and Rochelle (in the town of Stolpce) witnessed the horrors of ghettoization, forced labor, and mass killings that decimated their families. Jack and Rochelle managed, in their separate ways, to escape into the forest. They reunited, against all odds, in the winter of 1942–43 and became Jewish partisans who fought back against the Nazis. The couple’s careful courtship soon blossomed into an enduring love that sustained them through the raging hatred of the Holocaust and the destruction of the lives they had known. Jack and Rochelle’s story, told in their own voices through extensive interviews with their son, Lawrence, has been in print for twenty years and is celebrated as a classic of Holocaust memoir literature. This is the first electronic edition. “A story of heroism and of touching romance in a time of fear and danger.” —USA Today