Survivors

• Strangers in their own Land: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today by Peter Sichrovsky and Thomas Keneally
  Tauris, 177 pp, £10.95, May 1986, ISBN 1 85043 033 0
• Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland by Malgorzata Niezabitowska and Tomasz Tomaszewski, translated by William Brand and Hanna Dobosiewicz
  Friendly Press, 272 pp, £25.00, September 1986, ISBN 0 914919 05 9
• The Jews in Poland edited by Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk and Antony Polonsky
  Blackwell, 264 pp, £29.50, September 1986, ISBN 0 631 14857 4

On 20 July 1943 the Polish artist Jonasz Stern was executed along with hundreds of other Jews of the Lwow ghetto by SS machine-gun fire. He awoke from a faint to find himself alive, buried under the corpses of the entire neighbourhood, covered in other people’s blood and excrement, the only survivor on Janowski Street. Two of the books reviewed here are about survivors, people who turned right instead of left, ran instead of lingering or lingered instead of running, those who met kindly Polish peasants or had ‘good faces’ – did not look Jewish, that is to say – individuals who survived, crazily, randomly, inexplicably, when everybody else, not just their families but neighbours, associates at work, team-mates, local shopkeepers, their whole world, was murdered.