Revisiting the Shadows: Memoirs from War-Torn Poland to the Statue of Liberty

"Don’t forget the way they will have me die! Don’t forget that we tried to stand up to them until the last moment! Don’t forget what they are doing to us here! Don’t forget! Swear to me that you will tell the world!"
Golda Lipkies’s words shouted to Irene before Golda’s execution at Auschwitz.

This is the true story of Irene (Rena Hass), a Jewish teenager involved in the 1941-1943 resistance movement and uprising of the Bialystok Ghetto, which was second in historical significance only to the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Irene is one of the very few survivors of the 60,000 massacred Bialystok Jews. She survived the horrors of three concentration camps: Blizyn, Majdanek and Auschwitz. Irene’s father, a virtuoso violinist, was forced to perform before his own execution with the orchestra at the extermination camp of Majdanek in Poland. Her mother was a schoolteacher who suffered with Irene the horrors of the concentration camps until she died just before the end of the war at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany.

Revisiting the Shadows was written so that we will not forget. The atrocity of killing three and a half million Jews during the Holocaust from Poland alone (almost ten per cent of the country’s population)—similar to murdering 25 million Americans today—reminds us that some are still seeking ethnic cleansing, or genocide, in present-day forms of the Final Solution.

"Germans are different people now—I have German friends who carry the guilt of the war on their shoulders—the Germans helped us. No people, no nation has only bad people."
Ms. Shapiro as quoted by Laurie Sullivan in the Scarsdale Inquirer