Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Doctor's Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust: Survival in Lager Vapniarka and the Ghettos of Transnistria

A Doctor's Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust: Survival in Lager Vapniarka and the Ghettos of Transnistria

Kessler, Arthur
Robinson, Margaret
Spitzer, Leo

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralGeneral World HistoryHolocaust

ISBN10: 1648250939
ISBN13: 9781648250934
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Published: Sep 17 2024
Pages: 190
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Based on notes kept while incarcerated in the concentration camps and ghettos of Transnistria, Dr. Kessler's gripping Holocaust memoir tells a story of calculated murder, resistance, and survival.

In the aftermath of the Romanian Holocaust, Transnistria, a little-known region north of Odessa, between the Dniester and Bug rivers, came to be known as the forgotten cemetery. Between 1941 and 1944, an estimated 300,000 Jews were killed or died there from starvation and disease. This memoir by Dr. Arthur Kessler, based on daily notes he kept as a physician during his two-year imprisonment in Transnistria's Vapniarka concentration camp and Olgopol ghetto, provides a unique perspective of a Jewish medical doctor who witnessed murderous death as well as brave acts of resistance and survival.

Introduced and annotated by historian Leo Spitzer and translated from German by the late Margaret Robinson, Dr. Kessler's memoir provides an engrossing account of his infamous discovery that Vapniarka's Romanian authorities routinely, and it seems knowingly, fed camp inmates a daily soup containing toxic chickling peas (Lathyrus sativus) that induced paralysis, kidney failure, and oftentimes death. It reveals the daring by which he, together with fellow inmate medical associates, saved hundreds of lives by organizing a hunger strike that resulted in the camp's dissolution and the prisoners' relocation to ghettos throughout Transnistria. Kessler's narrative continues with an account of privileges attainable by deportees with useful skills and provides illuminating details about informal systems and practices that enabled many to survive and to provide care to fellow victims of genocidal persecution.

The memoir is illustrated with moving drawings produced by prisoners in the Vapniarka concentration camp and presented to Dr. Kessler in recognition of his brave work of healing.

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