I Survived to Tell

A Holocaust Memoir about Survival in the Warsaw Ghetto and 7 Camps

De: Noach (Natan) Żelechower

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In no less than seven concentration and extermination camps, the Polish-Jew Noach (Natan) Żelechower was imprisoned during World War II. His first wife and their daughter were transported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka and perished there during the Great Deportation of the Warsaw Jews in the summer of 1942, and he was left alone to face the threat of Nazi persecution and death.
With great resilience, fortitude, and the hope to be reunited with his wife and daughter, Noach was able to withstand and survive the hardships of the camp world, forced labor, and death marches. Throughout the war he kept repeating his daughter’s words in her last note:
“Daddy, save yourself! Perhaps fate will bring us back together again.”

He wrote his memoir in 1946, a few months after he returned to Warsaw and after confirming that his family had perished. In his memoir “I SURVIVED TO TELL”, with detailed descriptions of knowing hunger and the methods of torture by which his captors tormented him and his friends, Noach wrote about the prisoners’ relationships with one another and emphasizes the loss of hope. Alongside manifestations of sympathy and help, he powerfully illustrates the despair, the suffering, and the pain that dulled people’s emotions.
After the war, Noach married Paulina Weinreb, a Holocaust survivor as well, and in 1947 their only daughter Hana (Ani) was born.

On Hana’s initiative with her joint translation from Polish to Hebrew with her husband Stefan Cytron, the Hebrew version of her father’s memoir was published in January 2020 by Yad Vashem Publications (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center) under the title “המחנה השביעי שלי” (“My Seventh Camp”). And now, the translated memoir from Polish to English is published on Amazon.