Yad Vashem Publications

Zoltán Roth

There were many times when I felt an irresistible desire to stop, and those were moments that I had to really choose between fighting for life or not. My other option was to continue walking. It seems that struggling for the yet unlived part of my life was stronger. I didn’t stop.

Lazar Engles (Engelstern)

The moment we first set foot on the soil of the Naliboki Pushcha, the atmosphere was completely different. We felt a new kind of security, as if we were in our own partisan kingdom…. We had survived so many dangers, but we were now among Jews in the forest.

Prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Lazar Engles (Engelstern) lived a peaceful and fulfilled life in his beloved city of Vilna with his wife and two daughters. The Nazi occupation of the city in June 1941 and its subsequent ghettoization marked a rapid escalation of horrors for Lazar and his family.

Zvi Asaria-Hermann Helfgott

This is a unique account of the Holocaust and its aftermath by a Jewish Yugoslav army chaplain, based on his wartime diary. The author, PhD, rabbi and Army officer in World War II, spent four years in Germany among Yugoslavian Jewish officers who were prisoners of war. With distinct literary skill, he paints a broad scene of those days and delineates fine-tooled descriptions of the atmosphere engulfing the captive Jewish officers, Bergen-Belsen after the liberation and the dreams and struggles of the camp survivors.

Edited by Israel Gutman

Anna Szalai, Rita Horváth, Gábor Balázs

Dan Michman

Ruth Bondy

Kinga Frojimovics

Raz Segal

Editors: Roni Stauber, Aviva Halamish, Esther Webman

Miriam Offer

A last few words to honor you, the Jewish doctors. What canI tell you, my beloved colleagues and companions in misery?  You are a part of all of us. Slavery, hunger, deportation, thosedeath figures in our ghetto were also your legacy. And you byyour work could give the henchman the answer Non omnis moriar, I shall not wholly die. (Dr. Israel Milejkowski, Director, Judenrat Health Department in the Warsaw Ghetto, October 1942)

White Coats in the Ghetto narrates the struggle of the Jews to survive in the Warsaw ghetto while also preserving their humanity during the Holocaust. Based on a vast quantity of official and personal documents, it describes the elaborate medical system that the Jews established in the ghetto to cope with the lethal conditions imposed on them by the Nazis, and the tragic ethical dilemmas that the medical teams confronted under German occupation. 

Emanuele Artom, Edited by Guri Schwarz