Author: Victor Klemperer
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826491308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Victor Klemperer was Professor of French Literature at Dresden University. As a Jew, he was removed from his post in 1935, only surviving thanks to his marriage to an Aryan. Presenting a study of language and its engagement with history, this book draws form Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture.
Language of the Third Reich
Author: Victor Klemperer
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826491308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Victor Klemperer was Professor of French Literature at Dresden University. As a Jew, he was removed from his post in 1935, only surviving thanks to his marriage to an Aryan. Presenting a study of language and its engagement with history, this book draws form Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture.
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826491308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Victor Klemperer was Professor of French Literature at Dresden University. As a Jew, he was removed from his post in 1935, only surviving thanks to his marriage to an Aryan. Presenting a study of language and its engagement with history, this book draws form Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture.
I Will Bear Witness: 1942-1945
Author: Victor Klemperer
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 584
Book Description
"The best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." -Amos Elon, "The New York Times Victor Klemperer risked his life to preserve these diaries so that he could, as he wrote, "bear witness" to the gathering hor-ror of the Nazi regime. The son of a Berlin rabbi, Klemperer was a German patriot who served with honor during the First World War, married a gentile, and converted to Protestantism. He was a professor of Romance languages at the Dresden Technical Institute, a fine scholar and writer, and an intellectual of a somewhat conservative disposition. Unlike many of his Jewish friends and academic colleagues, he feared Hitler from the start, and though he felt little allegiance to any religion, under Nazi law he was a Jew. In the years 1933 to 1941, covered in the first volume of these diaries, Klemperer's life is not yet in danger, but he loses his professorship, his house, even his typewriter; he is not allowed to drive, and since Jews are forbidden to own pets, he must put his cat to death. Because of his military record and marriage to a "full-blooded Aryan," he is spared deportation, but nevertheless, Klemperer has to wear the yellow Jewish star, and he and his wife, Eva, are subjected to the ever-increasing escalation of Nazi tyranny. The distinguished historian Peter Gay, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote that Klemperer's "personal history of how the Third Reich month by month, sometimes week by week, accelerated its crusade against the Jews gives as accurate a picture of Nazi trickery and brutality as we are likely to have...a report from the interior that tells the horrifying story of the evolving Nazi persecution...witha concrete, vivid power that is, and I think will remain, unsurpassed." This volume begins in 1942, the year of the Final Solution, and ends in 1945, with the devastation of Hitler's Germany. Rumors of the death camps soon reach the Jews of Dresden, now jammed into their so-called Jews' houses, starved, humiliated, subject day and night to Gestapo raids, and terrified as, one by one, their neighbors are taken away. Klemperer is made to shovel snow, is assigned to do forced labor in a factory, is taunted on the streets by gangs of boys, but his life is spared, thanks to the privileged status of Jews married to Aryans. In the final days of the war, however, even Jews in mixed marriages are summoned to report for transport to "labor camps," which Klemperer now knows means death, and that his turn will soon come. He is saved by the great Dresden air raid of February 13, 1945; he and his wife survive the fiery destruction of their city and make their way to the Allied lines. "In the enthralling and appalling final pages of this miraculous work," wrote Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday Telegraph, "Klemperer all too soon encounters the deliberate amnesia of the defeated Germany: 'What is "Gestapo"?' declares a Breslau woman he encounters in May 1945. 'I've never heard the word. I've never been interested in politics, I don't know anything about the persecution of the Jews.'" Says Ferguson, "Of all the books I have read on this subject, I find it hard to think of one which has taught me more."
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 584
Book Description
"The best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." -Amos Elon, "The New York Times Victor Klemperer risked his life to preserve these diaries so that he could, as he wrote, "bear witness" to the gathering hor-ror of the Nazi regime. The son of a Berlin rabbi, Klemperer was a German patriot who served with honor during the First World War, married a gentile, and converted to Protestantism. He was a professor of Romance languages at the Dresden Technical Institute, a fine scholar and writer, and an intellectual of a somewhat conservative disposition. Unlike many of his Jewish friends and academic colleagues, he feared Hitler from the start, and though he felt little allegiance to any religion, under Nazi law he was a Jew. In the years 1933 to 1941, covered in the first volume of these diaries, Klemperer's life is not yet in danger, but he loses his professorship, his house, even his typewriter; he is not allowed to drive, and since Jews are forbidden to own pets, he must put his cat to death. Because of his military record and marriage to a "full-blooded Aryan," he is spared deportation, but nevertheless, Klemperer has to wear the yellow Jewish star, and he and his wife, Eva, are subjected to the ever-increasing escalation of Nazi tyranny. The distinguished historian Peter Gay, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote that Klemperer's "personal history of how the Third Reich month by month, sometimes week by week, accelerated its crusade against the Jews gives as accurate a picture of Nazi trickery and brutality as we are likely to have...a report from the interior that tells the horrifying story of the evolving Nazi persecution...witha concrete, vivid power that is, and I think will remain, unsurpassed." This volume begins in 1942, the year of the Final Solution, and ends in 1945, with the devastation of Hitler's Germany. Rumors of the death camps soon reach the Jews of Dresden, now jammed into their so-called Jews' houses, starved, humiliated, subject day and night to Gestapo raids, and terrified as, one by one, their neighbors are taken away. Klemperer is made to shovel snow, is assigned to do forced labor in a factory, is taunted on the streets by gangs of boys, but his life is spared, thanks to the privileged status of Jews married to Aryans. In the final days of the war, however, even Jews in mixed marriages are summoned to report for transport to "labor camps," which Klemperer now knows means death, and that his turn will soon come. He is saved by the great Dresden air raid of February 13, 1945; he and his wife survive the fiery destruction of their city and make their way to the Allied lines. "In the enthralling and appalling final pages of this miraculous work," wrote Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday Telegraph, "Klemperer all too soon encounters the deliberate amnesia of the defeated Germany: 'What is "Gestapo"?' declares a Breslau woman he encounters in May 1945. 'I've never heard the word. I've never been interested in politics, I don't know anything about the persecution of the Jews.'" Says Ferguson, "Of all the books I have read on this subject, I find it hard to think of one which has taught me more."
I Will Bear Witness, Volume 2
Author: Victor Klemperer
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0399589082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578
Book Description
Destined to take its place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night as one of the great classics of the Holocaust, I Will Bear Witness is a timeless work of literature, the most eloquent and acute testament to have emerged from Hitler's Germany. Volume Two begins in 1942, the year the Final Solution was formally proposed, and carries us through to the Allied bombing of Dresden and Germany's defeat.
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0399589082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578
Book Description
Destined to take its place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night as one of the great classics of the Holocaust, I Will Bear Witness is a timeless work of literature, the most eloquent and acute testament to have emerged from Hitler's Germany. Volume Two begins in 1942, the year the Final Solution was formally proposed, and carries us through to the Allied bombing of Dresden and Germany's defeat.
Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness (Historical Novel)
Author: Selma Lagerlöf
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98
Book Description
Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness is a result of a collaboration between Selma Lagerlöf and the Swedish association. The novel was written as a means of public education about tuberculosis. It is set in a small town in Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century. Edith, a young "Slum Sister" (social worker) in the service of the Salvation Army is on her death bed dying of tuberculosis. She requests that before she dies, she would like to again see David Holm, one of her charges. It becomes apparent that the two have a special relationship.
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98
Book Description
Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness is a result of a collaboration between Selma Lagerlöf and the Swedish association. The novel was written as a means of public education about tuberculosis. It is set in a small town in Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century. Edith, a young "Slum Sister" (social worker) in the service of the Salvation Army is on her death bed dying of tuberculosis. She requests that before she dies, she would like to again see David Holm, one of her charges. It becomes apparent that the two have a special relationship.
The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933-1945
Author: Victor Klemperer
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781842120224
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 1043
Book Description
A publishing sensation in Germany (where they have sold over 100,000 copies at 45), the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages in Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many of his friends, even his cat, as Jews were not allowed to own pets. Throughout, he, like so many other German Jews, remained loyal to his country, determined not to emigrate, and convinced that each successive Nazi act against the Jews must be the last. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary, for a Jew in Nazi Germany a daring act ion itself. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document, as powerful and astonishing in its way as Anne Frank's classic.This edition combines both volumes of his diaries, together forming the complete set. They cover the period from Hitler's election to the beginnings of the Holocaust, to the end of the war. They tell the story of Klemperer's increasing isolation, his near miraculous survival, his awareness of the development of the growing Holocaust as friends and associates disappeared, and his narrow escapes from deportation and the Dresden firebombing in 1945.
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781842120224
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 1043
Book Description
A publishing sensation in Germany (where they have sold over 100,000 copies at 45), the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages in Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many of his friends, even his cat, as Jews were not allowed to own pets. Throughout, he, like so many other German Jews, remained loyal to his country, determined not to emigrate, and convinced that each successive Nazi act against the Jews must be the last. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary, for a Jew in Nazi Germany a daring act ion itself. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document, as powerful and astonishing in its way as Anne Frank's classic.This edition combines both volumes of his diaries, together forming the complete set. They cover the period from Hitler's election to the beginnings of the Holocaust, to the end of the war. They tell the story of Klemperer's increasing isolation, his near miraculous survival, his awareness of the development of the growing Holocaust as friends and associates disappeared, and his narrow escapes from deportation and the Dresden firebombing in 1945.
The Stars Bear Witness [Illustrated Edition]
Author: Bernard Goldstein
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786254751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 671
Book Description
Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust “Born in a small town outside of Warsaw in 1889, Bernard Goldstein joined the Jewish labor organization, the Bund, at age 16 and dedicated his life to organizing workers and resisting tyranny. Goldstein spent time in prisons from Warsaw to Siberia, took part in the Russian Revolution and was a respected organizer within the vibrant labor movement in independent Poland. “In 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Poland and establishment of the Jewish Ghetto, Goldstein and the Bund went underground—organizing housing, food and clothing within the ghetto; communicating with the West for support; and developing a secret armed force. Smuggled out of the ghetto just before the Jewish militia’s heroic last stand, Goldstein assisted in procuring guns to aid those within the ghetto’s walls and aided in the fight to free Warsaw. After the liberation of Poland, Goldstein emigrated to America, where he penned this account of his five-and-a-half years within the Warsaw ghetto and his brave comrades who resisted to the end. His surprisingly modest and frank depiction of a community under siege at a time when the world chose not to intervene is enlightening, devastating and ultimately inspiring.”-Print ed. “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-and-a-half 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.”—Leonard Shatzkin
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786254751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 671
Book Description
Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust “Born in a small town outside of Warsaw in 1889, Bernard Goldstein joined the Jewish labor organization, the Bund, at age 16 and dedicated his life to organizing workers and resisting tyranny. Goldstein spent time in prisons from Warsaw to Siberia, took part in the Russian Revolution and was a respected organizer within the vibrant labor movement in independent Poland. “In 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Poland and establishment of the Jewish Ghetto, Goldstein and the Bund went underground—organizing housing, food and clothing within the ghetto; communicating with the West for support; and developing a secret armed force. Smuggled out of the ghetto just before the Jewish militia’s heroic last stand, Goldstein assisted in procuring guns to aid those within the ghetto’s walls and aided in the fight to free Warsaw. After the liberation of Poland, Goldstein emigrated to America, where he penned this account of his five-and-a-half years within the Warsaw ghetto and his brave comrades who resisted to the end. His surprisingly modest and frank depiction of a community under siege at a time when the world chose not to intervene is enlightening, devastating and ultimately inspiring.”-Print ed. “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-and-a-half 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.”—Leonard Shatzkin
Bearing Witness
Author: Bernie Glassman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101625252
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
Zen practitioner and non-profit community developer Bernie Glassman offers powerful teaching stories that illustrate ways of making peace one moment at a time. Each chapter focuses on an event or person and demonstrates how a particular peacemaker vow is put into practice. Through these stories and Glassman's personal testimony we come to understand the essence of peacemaking.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101625252
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
Zen practitioner and non-profit community developer Bernie Glassman offers powerful teaching stories that illustrate ways of making peace one moment at a time. Each chapter focuses on an event or person and demonstrates how a particular peacemaker vow is put into practice. Through these stories and Glassman's personal testimony we come to understand the essence of peacemaking.
I Will Bear Witness: 1933-1941
Author: Victor Klemperer
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 552
Book Description
The publication of Victor Klemperer's secret diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. "In its cool, lucid style and power of observation," said The New York Times, "it is the best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." I Will Bear Witness is a work of literature as well as a revelation of the day-by-day horror of the Nazi years. A Dresden Jew, a veteran of World War I, a man of letters and historian of great sophistication, Klemperer recognized the danger of Hitler as early as 1933. His diaries, written in secrecy, provide a vivid account of everyday life in Hitler's Germany. What makes this book so remarkable, aside from its literary distinction, is Klemperer's preoccupation with the thoughts and actions of ordinary Germans: Berger the greengrocer, who was given Klemperer's house ("anti-Hitlerist, but of course pleased at the good exchange"), the fishmonger, the baker, the much-visited dentist. All offer their thoughts and theories on the progress of the war: Will England hold out? Who listens to Goebbels? How much longer will it last? This symphony of voices is ordered by the brilliant, grumbling Klemperer, struggling to complete his work on eighteenth-century France while documenting the ever- tightening Nazi grip. He loses first his professorship and then his car, his phone, his house, even his typewriter, and is forced to move into a Jews' House (the last step before the camps), put his cat to death (Jews may not own pets), and suffer countless other indignities. Despite the danger his diaries would pose if discovered, Klemperer sees it as his duty to recordevents. "I continue to write," he notes in 1941 after a terrifying run-in with the police. "This is my heroics. I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end." When a neighbor remarks that, in his isolation, Klemperer will not be able to cover the main events of the war, he writes: "It's not the big things that are important, but the everyday life of tyranny, which may be forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I note, the mosquito bites." This book covers the years from 1933 to 1941. Volume Two, from 1941 to 1945, will be published in 1999.
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 552
Book Description
The publication of Victor Klemperer's secret diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. "In its cool, lucid style and power of observation," said The New York Times, "it is the best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." I Will Bear Witness is a work of literature as well as a revelation of the day-by-day horror of the Nazi years. A Dresden Jew, a veteran of World War I, a man of letters and historian of great sophistication, Klemperer recognized the danger of Hitler as early as 1933. His diaries, written in secrecy, provide a vivid account of everyday life in Hitler's Germany. What makes this book so remarkable, aside from its literary distinction, is Klemperer's preoccupation with the thoughts and actions of ordinary Germans: Berger the greengrocer, who was given Klemperer's house ("anti-Hitlerist, but of course pleased at the good exchange"), the fishmonger, the baker, the much-visited dentist. All offer their thoughts and theories on the progress of the war: Will England hold out? Who listens to Goebbels? How much longer will it last? This symphony of voices is ordered by the brilliant, grumbling Klemperer, struggling to complete his work on eighteenth-century France while documenting the ever- tightening Nazi grip. He loses first his professorship and then his car, his phone, his house, even his typewriter, and is forced to move into a Jews' House (the last step before the camps), put his cat to death (Jews may not own pets), and suffer countless other indignities. Despite the danger his diaries would pose if discovered, Klemperer sees it as his duty to recordevents. "I continue to write," he notes in 1941 after a terrifying run-in with the police. "This is my heroics. I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end." When a neighbor remarks that, in his isolation, Klemperer will not be able to cover the main events of the war, he writes: "It's not the big things that are important, but the everyday life of tyranny, which may be forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I note, the mosquito bites." This book covers the years from 1933 to 1941. Volume Two, from 1941 to 1945, will be published in 1999.
Munich 1919
Author: Victor Klemperer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509510621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Munich 1919 is a vivid portrayal of the chaos that followed World War I and the collapse of the Munich Council Republic by one of the most perceptive chroniclers of German history. Victor Klemperer provides a moving and thrilling account of what turned out to be a decisive turning point in the fate of a nation, for the revolution of 1918-9 not only produced the first German democracy, it also heralded the horrors to come. With the directness of an educated and independent young man, Klemperer turned his hand to political journalism, writing astute, clever and linguistically brilliant reports in the beleaguered Munich of 1919. He sketched intimate portraits of the people of the hour, including Erich Mühsam, Max Levien and Kurt Eisner, and took the measure of the events around him with a keen eye. These observations are made ever more poignant by the inclusion of passages from his later memoirs. In the midst of increasing persecution under the Nazis he reflected on the fateful year 1919, the growing threat of antisemitism, and the acquaintances he made in the period, some of whom would later abandon him, while others remained loyal. Klemperer's account once again reveals him to be a fearless and deeply humane recorder of German history. Munich 1919 will be essential reading for all those interested in 20th century history, constituting a unique witness to events of the period.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509510621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Munich 1919 is a vivid portrayal of the chaos that followed World War I and the collapse of the Munich Council Republic by one of the most perceptive chroniclers of German history. Victor Klemperer provides a moving and thrilling account of what turned out to be a decisive turning point in the fate of a nation, for the revolution of 1918-9 not only produced the first German democracy, it also heralded the horrors to come. With the directness of an educated and independent young man, Klemperer turned his hand to political journalism, writing astute, clever and linguistically brilliant reports in the beleaguered Munich of 1919. He sketched intimate portraits of the people of the hour, including Erich Mühsam, Max Levien and Kurt Eisner, and took the measure of the events around him with a keen eye. These observations are made ever more poignant by the inclusion of passages from his later memoirs. In the midst of increasing persecution under the Nazis he reflected on the fateful year 1919, the growing threat of antisemitism, and the acquaintances he made in the period, some of whom would later abandon him, while others remained loyal. Klemperer's account once again reveals him to be a fearless and deeply humane recorder of German history. Munich 1919 will be essential reading for all those interested in 20th century history, constituting a unique witness to events of the period.
You Will Bear Witness
Author: Erin Fado
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781091400108
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
Your Will Bear Witness is a survival story provoking the reader to pay attention to whatmight be happening around them and to question their presumptions about normal decency.Set in a bucolic Irish Seaside village, so often idealised by tourist brochures, Erin Fado paints a heart-rending portrait of her childhood innocence ruthlessly exploited by those with the greatest responsibility for her safety.Far from being nurtured by her social-climbing parents and their eminent connections that encompass the prominent Church spires and beyond to the Houses of Westminster, Erin and the other children who "visit" are used and discarded like disposable chattels with no personal worth beyond their bodies.Her parents' popular Hotel is the centre of the harbour village life and during the Summer months becomes a drawcard for visiting yachtsmen from the UK and Europe and high-profile Dubliners with holiday homes. In the middle of this apparently idyllic seaside village Erin Fado is kept imprisoned by her parents' who, in league with a local entrepreneur, provide local men and visitors alike with children to satisfy more than their thirst.Without self-pity Fado somehow manages to tell a story of hope, extraordinary resilience and inspiring survival. Her concern is focussed on those other visiting children who may or may not have survived. This is a story that might have happened in many places to many people but nobody has survived to reach the place Erin Fado has managed to reach at great personal cost. Having at last escaped Ireland with the help of the Salvation Army and miraculously built a new life in Australia Erin Fado has survived and attained, only just, a level of safety where she can honestly recall her trauma and reach out to others. Her simple, heartfelt testimony inspires the reader to bear witness to truth in the hope that facing humanities' demons might ensure such decimation of innocence under the thin veneer of respectability doesn't keep happening.
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781091400108
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
Your Will Bear Witness is a survival story provoking the reader to pay attention to whatmight be happening around them and to question their presumptions about normal decency.Set in a bucolic Irish Seaside village, so often idealised by tourist brochures, Erin Fado paints a heart-rending portrait of her childhood innocence ruthlessly exploited by those with the greatest responsibility for her safety.Far from being nurtured by her social-climbing parents and their eminent connections that encompass the prominent Church spires and beyond to the Houses of Westminster, Erin and the other children who "visit" are used and discarded like disposable chattels with no personal worth beyond their bodies.Her parents' popular Hotel is the centre of the harbour village life and during the Summer months becomes a drawcard for visiting yachtsmen from the UK and Europe and high-profile Dubliners with holiday homes. In the middle of this apparently idyllic seaside village Erin Fado is kept imprisoned by her parents' who, in league with a local entrepreneur, provide local men and visitors alike with children to satisfy more than their thirst.Without self-pity Fado somehow manages to tell a story of hope, extraordinary resilience and inspiring survival. Her concern is focussed on those other visiting children who may or may not have survived. This is a story that might have happened in many places to many people but nobody has survived to reach the place Erin Fado has managed to reach at great personal cost. Having at last escaped Ireland with the help of the Salvation Army and miraculously built a new life in Australia Erin Fado has survived and attained, only just, a level of safety where she can honestly recall her trauma and reach out to others. Her simple, heartfelt testimony inspires the reader to bear witness to truth in the hope that facing humanities' demons might ensure such decimation of innocence under the thin veneer of respectability doesn't keep happening.