I Did Not Want to Die: From Norway to Auschwitz

Robert Savosnick | As told to Hans Melien

NIS 91.00

“Today there are very few of us left to bear witness to the horrors of the German concentration camps. I feel that it is my duty to spread the knowledge of this tragedy. It is painful to remember. Yet it must be done.”

On October 26, 1942, Norwegian medical student Robert Savosnick (born in Trondheim in 1915) was arrested and, one month later, he was one of 532 Jews deported on the SS Donau. The next two and a half years of Savosnick’s life were lost in an existence of torture, brutality, and human degradation. He spent a year incarcerated in Auschwitz, and a further ten months clearing the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Together with thousands of Jewish prisoners, Savosnick was taken on a death march, eventually arriving in Dachau. He was liberated in the subcamp of Allach in April 1945. Robert Savosnick returned to Norway and completed his medical studies, becoming a much-loved pediatrician in his hometown of Trondheim. Yet his experiences during the Holocaust remained so vivid that a smell, a sound, a German voice caused him to relive the nightmare. Savosnick was one of the very few Norwegian Jews who survived the camps and could testify to the horrors. “I feel it is my duty to those who did not survive to pass on information about what occurred,” he said. Guided by this sense of duty, he spoke publicly about his experiences, responded to antisemitic articles in the press, and committed his story to paper. With the assistance of prize-winning Norwegian journalist Hans Melien, and with historical annotations, I Did Not Want to Die: From Norway to Auschwitz depicts his unique journey and records the experiences of Norwegian Jews during the Holocaust. Hence, recently, the Norwegian branch of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register declared Savosnick’s history part of Norway’s documentary heritage.

“Today there are very few of us left to bear witness to the horrors of the German concentration camps. I feel that it is my duty to spread the knowledge of this tragedy. It is painful to remember. Yet it must be done.”

On October 26, 1942, Norwegian medical student Robert Savosnick (born in Trondheim in 1915) was arrested and, one month later, he was one of 532 Jews deported on the SS Donau. The next two and a half years of Savosnick’s life were lost in an existence of torture, brutality, and human degradation. He spent a year incarcerated in Auschwitz, and a further ten months clearing the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Together with thousands of Jewish prisoners, Savosnick was taken on a death march, eventually arriving in Dachau. He was liberated in the subcamp of Allach in April 1945. Robert Savosnick returned to Norway and completed his medical studies, becoming a much-loved pediatrician in his hometown of Trondheim. Yet his experiences during the Holocaust remained so vivid that a smell, a sound, a German voice caused him to relive the nightmare. Savosnick was one of the very few Norwegian Jews who survived the camps and could testify to the horrors. “I feel it is my duty to those who did not survive to pass on information about what occurred,” he said. Guided by this sense of duty, he spoke publicly about his experiences, responded to antisemitic articles in the press, and committed his story to paper. With the assistance of prize-winning Norwegian journalist Hans Melien, and with historical annotations, I Did Not Want to Die: From Norway to Auschwitz depicts his unique journey and records the experiences of Norwegian Jews during the Holocaust. Hence, recently, the Norwegian branch of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register declared Savosnick’s history part of Norway’s documentary heritage.

מפרט המוצר
Year 2021
ISBN 978-965-308-643-2
No. of Pages 240 pp.
Size 16X24 cm.
Format Hard Cover
Translator Translator: Margrit Rosenberg Stenge
Publisher Yad Vashem
תגיות מוצר
גולשים שקנו מוצר זה קנו גם

White Coats in the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland during the Holocaust

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. 

NIS 169.00 NIS 109.00
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