Story of a People

This is the story of a people, its origin, its history, its struggle for survival and its tragic end—the life-and-death story of Polish and other Eastern European Jewries. It is all this and more; more than a mere historical sketch or an episodic narrative of human greatness, more than a record of fighting gallantry and Nazi gore. It is the epic of a people, its prose and its poetry, its piety and devotional consecration, its visions of a heavenly glory in an environment of collective disapproval, its never-fading hopes amidst strains of despair—a people that lived by the book and died by the sword.

The vitality of these Jewries in so strange an environment—an underprivileged, underground minority, at best as citizens in exile—has been a puzzle to historians. Somehow their rise did not fit in with orthodox sociological theories or historical precedents. Neither did their tragic end, and while their life was a miracle, their execution is a nightmare which shall not cease plaguing the human mind, if not man’s conscience.—From Author’s Preface