"The book is a collection of first-hand accounts by 153 survivors and testimony of 20 liberators of concentration camps."New York Times (NJ edition)

A project of the Holocaust Resource Center of Kean University, New Jersey, this book is a reference tool for teaching the Nazi Holocaust, for survivors and their families, and for the general reader. Drawing on the centers mission is to produce and preserve a series of oral-history videotapes based on the experiences of survivors residing in New Jersey. Joseph J. Preil brings together 153 of these testimonies as well as accounts by twenty
American liberators. Through these wrenching personal accounts, the book traces the mass murder of the Jews across Europe within a geographical as well as chronological framework. The testimonies in each chapter are grouped by the witnesses country or region of origin, preceded by a brief introduction of the history of events in a particular area. This is followed by a chapter in which American soldiers recount their impressions of being present at the liberation of the camps. The book concludes by relating how survivors rebuilt their lives often very successfully in the New World.

Joseph J. Preil is a professor of education at Kean University.

"Read this collection. The cruelty of the killers, the cowardice of the bystanders, the brutality of the collaborators, the desperate faith of the believers, the solitude of the condemned, the magnificent bravery of the liberators: all of these themes appear here. These survivors and their liberators are speaking to you. Listen to them, and you will be grateful to them."Elie Wiesel

"If you can imagine that the Jew to the German was like a cockroach. In the United States, if you step on a cockroach . . . it doesnt mean anything to you. The same thing, exactly the same thing, the Jew was to the Germana cockroach. . . . One particular Shabbos, they shot twelve or thirteen people in my area. In other words, the German had the right, if he saw me, any Jew that he saw in the street, he could go over to you calmly, take out his revolver, and put it to your head, and shoot you down like a . . . roach. He didnt have to fill out a form, he didnt have to go to the police. . . . Nothing, absolutely nothing. It was a free-for-all."Testimony of Sol Einhorn, cited in Holocaust Testimonies: European Survivors and American Liberators in New Jersey