Joseph
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2009
Summary
His voice was not audible, but he spoke loudly.
He was an ocean away, yet he was a visible pillar of strength.
He was tormented by failure, but succeeded more than he imagined.
He had every reason to abandon hope, yet he created a new world for himself.
Joseph Arthur Hollander is the central character in this book. He left Europe in 1939 and arrived, quite unexpectedly, at Ellis Island on December 6, 1939. As an undocumented refugee, Joseph threw himself at the mercy of the American legal system. By the time he returned to Europe in March 1945, he proudly wore American military fatigues and a U.S. Army dog tag. Then, on July 17, 1945, the enlistee walked into Hitler's office, took an axe, and chopped a block of coffee-colored marble from the Führer's desk. From Berlin, Joseph insightfully wrote to his American bride in English, a language that he had already mastered: “I broke up a piece of Hitler's marble desk on which he signed so many treaties and agreements he never kept and so many murder decrees he fulfilled to the last word” (letter to Vita, July 17, 1945, Berlin).
Mostly, this is the story of my father, a man who was a victim of the Holocaust although he never saw a ghetto, experienced the dehumanizing conduct of Nazi overseers, nor witnessed the indescribable atrocities.
Joseph owed his survival to an improbable sequence of events and a fierce will to survive.
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- Information
- Every Day Lasts a YearA Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland, pp. 3 - 42Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007