A Letter To My Children, From the Edge of the Holocaust

Abraham J. Klausner, young Rabbi from Denver, Colorado graduated Hebrew Union College in 1943 and volunteered for the U.S. Army’s chaplains’ corps. In the beginning of May, 1945 he walked through the gates of the Dachau concentration camp. He immediately recognized the need to provide for the survivors and began a unique personal and professional journey that took him across the survival landscape, pitted him against military and political bureaucrats and made him a touchstone for holocaust survivors. By force and by miracle Klausner was able to move mountains to restore dignity and life to those lost in the whirlwind of the post-war DP period.

These experiences are chronicled in this important memoir, A Letter to My Children, From the Edge of the Holocaust. In his book Klausner correctly questions the long held historical opinion of Truman’s role in the DP period with correspondence and documentation others have ignored. Filled with Klausner’s first hand account of the contentious time and his own papers from the period, the historical significance of the book is immense. It sheds new light and opens new doors to research on the period that, until now, had been incomplete. Klausner’s own accomplishments are miraculous including the establishment of all Jewish DP camps, compiling the definitive lists of Holocaust survivors and publishing them as the Sharit Ha-Platah volumes, coordinating Earl Harrison’s itinerary while in Germany and conducting the first post-war Passover seder in Germany. The memoir also includes personal stories that reveal the emotion charged events that give credence to the term "miracle".