Description

Most of Bernard Goldstein's first sixty years were spent in active revolutionary service, first against the Russian Czar, and then against the semi-fascist Polish government. In independent Poland he organized an illegal militia, and his efforts made him an almost legendary hero for the harassed Jews. His active leadership before the war and his position in the Jewish underground during it qualify him as the chronicler of the last hours of Warsaw's Jews. Out of the tortured memories of those five years he has brought forth the picture with all its shadings--the good with the bad, the cowardly with the heroic, the disgraceful with the glorious. This is his valedictory, his final service to the Jews of Warsaw. This book is his clear, dignified, factual, and moving account of what happened to him and what happened to his people and his doomed community: the fabric of their lives; the forces working for and against them; the heroic if unsuccessful uprising, the raids, the deportations, the bunkers.