Sara Bender

I must say that this book begins quite slowly; for me, the first 100 pages or so dragged, with a lot of numbers and such trivia about life prior to the German occupation. I wondered whether to finish it. Things picked up considerably after June 1941, however, and I'm glad I got the opportunity to learn about this undeservedly obscure ghetto and its two leaders, Mordechai Tenenbaum and Ephraim Barash.

Bialystok was an unusual Nazi ghetto in a lot of ways. It lasted longer than most of the others, and had much better living conditions: it was "organized, industrious, and even prosperous. Unlike other ghettos, it never experienced starvation or abject poverty." Barash was a uniquely popular and effective Judenrat leader. As for Tenenbaum, well, that guy was just a hero. The final days of the ghetto, and their doomed struggle, are the stuff of which epics are made. I also really liked the ending where the author compared Bialystok with other Nazi ghettos such as Warsaw, Vilna, etc., and discusses the differences and the reasons for their successes and failures.

This is, I think, the only book-length study of the Bialystok Ghetto, and I am very impressed by it. It's a valuable contribution to Holocaust scholarship.… (mer)