Book Description:
Jacob Frank survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau and the little known Lipowa Labor Camp in Lublin, Poland. The SS randomly chose him to head a 450 man tailor operation at Lipowa, which put him in contact with such notorious SS officers as Himmler, Eichmann, Goeth, and Globocnik. He made leather coats, uniforms, and personal apparel for these and other Nazis, and Frank's stories about these events are both fascinating and chilling. Because he was an eyewitness to major Nazi operations and atrocities and had intimate knowledge of beatings, torture, and murder, Frank testified in the war crimes trials of Lipowa commandant Wolfgang Mohwinkel and other SS officers in Hamburg in 1973. Frank's account of his imprisonment in Lipowa details how factories operated within the labor camp system, the construction of the Majdanek death camp, and how he learned of mass shootings in nearby villages. The sole survivor of his sixty four member family, Frank provides the only firsthand account in English of Lublin and the destruction of its Jewish quarter, which was one of Poland's major ghettos. Amid the horrors and everyday minutiae of life under the Nazis, he reflects on the role of faith, the will to live, and the temptation of suicide. Frank and Lewis discuss survivor guilt, Jewish identity, the psychology of victims and perpetrators, and the role of memory. By preserving Frank's Yiddish English diction, the book makes the bold step of documenting the survivor's authentic voice, rather than creating a sterilized account in corrected English. The book is also highly unique in survivor literature because it include Frank and Lewis' discussions, showing the interactions between survivor and listener and how the layers of memory were peeled back.
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