by Edward Anders (2010)
Edward Anders, son of Adolf Alperovitch (1897-1941) and Erika Sheftelovitch-Meiran (1895-1992), was born in 1926 in Libau, Latvia. He immigrated to the United States in 1949. He married Joan Fleming in 1955. They had two children.
photographs by Mark Seliger
Captured here with clarity and truth are fifty images of survival, portraits of the men and women who lives through the brutality to triumph over oppression: survivors truly. Their wrenching first-person accounts accompany intimate photographs and tell of experiences with an immediacy that is both mesmerising and appalling.
Ernő Sz ép
The Smell of Humans recapitulates the events following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, and then narrates the 19-day story of the forced march, the prison camp at the brick factory, the digging of trenches outside Budapest, the round-the-clock exposure to the elements and to the whims of the guards (ranging from taunts to summary executions), until the release of the author three weeks later, when the regular army took the labourers out of the hands of the Arrow Cross henchmen. Primarily a piece of creative writing and autobiographical literature of a very distinctive Central European kind, this detailed and imaginative short memoir is also an important document of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944. What is unique is Szep's tone, a meld of stupefaction and irony. Without overt condemnation or succumbing to despair, he somehow manages to describe, in precise detail, a series of events along progressively grosser stages of infamy. These daily mounting horrors acquire an additional intensity generated by the author's wide-eyed, childlike refusal to accept the fact of man's inhumanity to man.
John Borneman and Jeffrey M. Peck
This absorbing book of interviews takes one to the heart of modern German Jewish history. Of the eleven German Jews interviewed, four are from West Berlin, and seven are from East Berlin. The interviews provide an exceptionally varied and intimate portrait of Jewish experience in twentieth-century Germany. There are first-hand accounts of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the divided Germany of the Cold War era. There are also vivid descriptions of the new united Germany, with its alarming resurgence of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Some of the men and women interviewed affirm their dual German and Jewish identities with vigor. There is the West Berliner, for instance, who proclaims, "I am a German Jew. I want to live here." Others describe the impossibility of being both German and Jewish: "I don't have anything in common with the whole German people." Many confess to profound ambivalence, such as the East Berliner who feels that he is neither a native nor a foreigner in Germany: "If someone asks me, 'Who are you?' then I can only say, 'I am a fish out of water.'"
David A. Adler
The true story of Lore Baer who as a four-year-old Jewish child was placed with a Christian family in the Dutch farm country to avoid persecution by the Nazis.