As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto
As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto (Hardcover)
Description
Philipp Manes was an average, well-to-do middle-class Berlin merchant, who considered himself first and foremost a German, and then a Jew. In 1942 he was deported to Theresienstadt, together with his wife Gertud. Theresienstadt, initially intended for the Jews of Czechoslovakia, later became the "showpiece" ghetto of the Third Reich to show the world that the Jews were being treated humanely. It was controlled by the SS but run by a council of Jewish elders, and presented to the Red Cross as an idyllic utopia with shops, cafes, concerts and theatre groups. Manes himself organized over 500 evening lectures. But in reality, Theresienstadt was a holding post for Jews being shipped to certain death, chiefly in Treblinka and Auschwitz. Manes wrote his first-hand account in the ghetto before his deportation to Auschwitz, where he and his wife were killed.
Manes’ account is filled with careful and fascinating details of everyday life in those years, and delivers an accurate portrait of the ghetto, its inmates and practices, offering a new understanding of one of the most painful periods in the history of mankind.
About the Author
Philipp Manes (1875-1944) was a Berlin furrier before he and his wife were stripped of their possessions and transported to Theresienstadt in 1942. Two years later, Manes and his wife were transported to Auschwitz, where they were killed in October of 1944.
Klaus Leist (editor) is an economist and former international business executive who worked in Britain, Belgium, the United States and Germany. He is the author of two articles about Philipp Manes and the chronicle one in the Journal of Holocaust Education and the other in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente. He lives in London with his wife.
Ben Barkow (editor) is the director of the Wiener Library, London and the author of Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library, editor of Testaments of the Holocaust, series 1 – 3 and co-editor of Novemberpogrom 1938: Die Augenzeugenberichte Der Wiener Library, London (with Raphael Gross and Michael Lenarz. He lives in London.
.
