May God Avenge Their Blood

Book excerpt: May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912–1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Łódź and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.