Anna Eilenberg Eibeshitz published several books about the Shoah in recent years, inlcuding the autobiographical Breaking the Silence and Sisters in the Storm as well as two volumes on Women in the Holocaust.
Like many other survivors, she was for a long period of time unwilling to talk about the Holocaust. She felt that in order to be able to rebuild her shattered life, she had to suppress her memories. Mrs. Eilenberg Eibeschitz cites several other reasons for the prolonged silence of survivors.
Recent years, however, have witnessed a change in the attitude of the survivors. Having reached old age, many of them recognized that they were duty bound to acquaint their children and grandchildren with the lives and deaths of their near and dear ones, the martyrs of the Holocaust, as well as with their own struggles and suffering during that period.
“The aging survivor also want to import lessons for future generations, to reveal his own insight and most important, to make sure the world never forgets,” Mrs. Eilenberg-Eibeschitz writes. “The survivor carries a passion for justice, a desire to hunt down the Nazi criminals who so brutally victimized him and his loved ones. H wants to ensure that his descendants will never undergo a similar experience.”
Mrs. Eilenberg-Eibeschitz was helped in breaking her own silence by her teacher, Dr. Nathalie Marshal Nedal of Barry University, at which she had enrolled in 1980. Discussing with her teacher certain subjects she wanted to write about but wasn’t sure she could handle, she was told: “Just put your recollections on paper. Write every day. Write until the whole story is on paper. You have to write for the sake of others who are still silent and for yourself.
Her Preserved Evidence- Ghetto Lodz (volume 1) was published in 1998. It tells by means of testimonies, the story of Lodz Jewry from the day the city was occupied by the Germans (September 8, 1939) until the liquidation of the Ghetto — Poland’s last in the summer of 1944, when the city’s remaining Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
The second volume of Preserved Evidence – Lodz Ghetto appeared a short time ago. Its first two chapters feature testimonies aobut he fate of the Lodz Jews who been shipped to Auschwitz. (The very young, the old, the sick and the crippled were immediately sent to the gas chambers; those found fit for work were condemned to slave labot. They were housed in overcrowded quarters, subsisted on a starvation diet, were exposed to to inhuman treatment and steady abuses, and lived in constant fear of new “selections,” as a result of which they would be sent to the gas chambers.