This is a document of singular importance. It is a comprehensive and faithful record by an eye-witness of the systematic process of destruction - material, moral and physical - of one of the most important Jewish communities in Europe, as carried out by the German administration, from its chief organ the Gestapo and its many instruments, down to the ill famed Jewish ‘Ordnungsdienst’. The process of destruction was based on a central plan and, as observed and described here, was applied throughout Poland, with local refinements according the degree of depravity of the officials on the spot.

The strangulation of the Jewish community was designed to be carried out in stages: by setting them apart from the Polish population, restricting ·their movement, causing their economic ruin, locking them up in ghettoes, decimating them by forced labour and finally by sending them to their death in gas chambers.

Dr Aleksander Biberstein was an eye-witness to all these stages bar the last. From the moment the Germans marched into Krakow, he kept a notebook of events wherein he recorded what he saw and heard. He knew this was an important task and he guarded his notes as his most valued possession. When the ghetto was liquidated and he was moved to the camp in Płaszów, he kept the notebooks on him and continued making entries. From Płaszów he was transported to the concentration camp in Gross-Rosen and the notebooks were lost. Through a sequence of improbable coincidences - as is the case with virtually every survivor -Biberstein ended up in Brunnlitz, as one specimen in the famous ‘Schindler's Ark’. After the liberation he stayed on in Poland until 1958, when he emigrated to Israel.

The text in our possession is his own reconstruction of the original notebooks, his remarkable memory refreshed and amplified by probing conversations with other survivors and examination of documents in the archives. The manuscript of over one thousand pages has been ably edited and the ‘Wydawnictwo Literackie’ in Krakow, a publishing house of good repute, is to be congratulated on the production of this book. (A small cavil: the dustjacket has a photograph of two bearded Jews in gaberdines and ghetto armbands sweeping the road. The caption relating to the picture says: ‘Jewish lawyers in the ghetto.’ This, of course, is a mistake. No Jewish lawyer ever looked like this.)