Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp »

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and the author of Ordinary Men, Remembering Survival and other works of Holocaust history. He lives in Chapel Hill.

"An important, revealing story, exceptionally well told."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

The literature of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany is so vast as to defy comprehension, yet there remain aspects of the subject that are insufficiently covered or not covered at all. Christopher Browning's fine, harrowing Remembering Survival points us in yet another little-charted direction. It is the history of a Nazi slave-labor camp at Starachowice, in central Poland, where between 1942 and 1944 thousands of Jews were forced to work…to produce munitions for the Nazi war machine…Browning is keenly sensitive to the unreliability of memory, especially memory of distant events, so as he stitches together the story of Starachowice he is especially careful to distinguish between reliable and unreliable evidence. There can be no doubt, however, of the essential truth of this story, a small one when viewed against everything else that happened in that dreadful time, but an important and revealing one, exceptionally well told in Remembering Survival.

List of Illustrations

Map - Occupied Poland, 1939-1944

Map - Wierzbnik-Starachowice: The Surrounding Region

Map - Wierzbnik-Starachowice: Ghetto, Factories, and Camps

Introduction 1

Pt. I The Jews of Wierzbnik

1 The Prewar Jewish Community of Wierzbnik-Starachowice 15

2 The Outbreak of War 24

3 The Early Months of German Occupation 30

4 The Judenrat 34

5 The German Occupiers in Wierzbnik-Starachowice 40

6 Coping with Adversity in Wierzbnik, 1940-1942 51

Pt. II The Destruction of the Wierzbnik Ghetto

7 Wierzbnik on the Eve of Destruction 65

8 The Aktion, October 27, 1942 83

9 Into the Camps 101

Pt. III Terror and Typhus: Fall 1942-Spring 1943

10 Personalities and Structures 113

11 The Typhus Epidemic 121

12 The Althoff Massacres 125

13 Tartak 135

Pt. IV Stabilization

14 The Kolditz Era: Summer-Fall 1943 141

15 Jewish Work 153

16 Food, Property, and the Underground Economy 159

17 The Ukrainian Guards 168

18 Poles and Jews 172

19 Children in the Camps 176

20 Childbirth, Abortion, Sex, and Rape 185

21 The Schroth Era: Winter-Spring 1944 192

Pt. V Consolidation, Escape, Evacuation

22 Closing Majowka and Tartak 207

23 The Final Days 218

24 From Starachowice to Birkenau 226

25 The Starachowice Women and Children in Birkenau 239

26 Escapees 246

Pt. VI Aftermath

27 Return to and Flight from Wierzbnik 259

28 Postwar Investigations and Trials in Germany 270

29 Conclusion 291

Notes 301

Index 363