Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

We are the bleeding clouds, and from the seas of blood have we come... We are witnesses... we were brought into being by an inferno of suffering; and we are a sign of peace to you. - Moshe Ze'ev Flinker, Age 17

On the eve of Passover, 1944, shortly after he wrote these words, Moshe and his family were betrayed to the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. Like the other four diarists in this book, he did not survive the war. But their words did. Written in the midst of "an inferno of suffering," these fragile yet powerful records are a "sign of peace" to all of us.

Each diary reveals one voice, one teenager coping with the impossible. We see David Rubinowicz struggling against fear and terror in Poland. Yitzhak Rudashevski in Lithuania shows us how Jews clung to culture, to learning, and to hope, until there was no hope at all. In Belgium, Moshe is the voice of religion, constantly seeking answers from God for relentless tragedy. Finally, in Hungary, Eva Heyman demonstrates the unquenchable hunger for life that sustained her until the very last moment.Yet We Are Witnesses is not just about any single victim in the Holocaust.

Author Jacob Boas, who was born in the same camp to which Anne Frank was sent, ends by discussing her famous diary. Looking back at the other four through Anne, and at Anne with fresh eyes after the others, we see the largest truth they all left for us: Hitler could kill millions, but he could not destroy the human spirit. These stark accounts of how five young people faced the worst of human evil are a testament, and an inspiration, to the best in the human soul.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Born in 1943 in the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland, Boas here brilliantly unfolds the history of the Holocaust through poignant excerpts from five teenagers' wartime diaries, enhanced with skillful commentary. Predictably, Anne Frank turns up, in the final section, but, as Boas points out, ``alongside the other four diaries, Anne's looks different than when you read it by itself as the sole voice of the Holocaust.'' By the time readers encounter Anne Frank, they will have met Jewish teenagers trapped in equally tragic but even more violent circumstances in various parts of Europe, from a small Polish village to the Vilna ghetto to Brussels and Hungary. The young writers relay their hopes and fears even as they chronicle the disintegration of their daily lives. One is religious, another politically active, others wrapped up in their families-Boas points out each writer's sensitivities as he explains the terrible traps into which the individual teenagers fall. In exploring their fates, he impresses upon the reader their vitality, and, by extension, implies the enormity of the Holocaust's losses. Ages 12-up. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Horn Book Review

Foreword by Patricia C. McKissack. Narrative accounts of five young Jews, including Anne Frank, whose diaries hold their observations and emotions, give immediacy to the horrors of the Holocaust. The text provides historical information and compares the experiences of the diarists, quoting liberally from the teenagers' writings. Although these condensed versions lack the impact of a complete diary, the cumulative effect of the five journals is overwhelming. From HORN BOOK 1995, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Book Review

A riveting collection of texts that, rather than variations on a theme, remain stubbornly individualistic, adding up to a stereoscopic vision of the Holocaust. The teenagers who kept these diariesthe son of a Polish dairyman, a young communist in the Vilna ghetto, an Orthodox Jew in Brussels, a Hungarian girl from a wealthy family, Anne Frank in Amsterdamhad practically nothing in common, aside from the fact that they met the same fate. Boas couches longer and shorter quotes from the diaries with historical background and his own reflections. His analysis can be platitudinous, and almost stifling in the case of the Polish boy, the only diarist who was not a city- dweller, and the one with the least-individuated voice. But Boas's historical notes, in conjunction with the diaries, amount to a guided tour of the Holocaust, detailing the strategies used by the Nazis in five different settings. Each diary could stand on its own merit without outside elaboration; all are products of independent personalities, but perhaps nothing could have made them more effective than putting them in one book. Perhaps, too, the most significant result of the editorial process is the perfect order in which the diaries are placed: The book reads like a tragedy in five acts. (b&w photos, index, map) (Nonfiction. 12+)