FOREWORD TO THE 2018 EDITION

(This is a chapter from Jack Glotzer’s memoir, I Survived the German Holocaust Against All Odds. Click here to return to the Table of Contents.)

As the children of Jack Glotzer, we were always aware that his childhood and adolescence was unlike that of any of our contemporaries. He was a warm, fun-loving and devoted father. As we grew older we began to fully comprehend the painful events that he and his family had endured during the Holocaust. Although it was difficult for him to recount all of the atrocities that he had borne and witnessed, he told us his experiences with explicit instructions for us to pass these truths down to subsequent generations.

“We must never forget” was his wish for the generations to come. Despite the pain of recalling his past, he finally agreed to allow our mother, Beatrice Glotzer, with the help of her brother, Alexander Walzer, to record his personal history. We feel strongly that as first-generation children of Holocaust survivors, it is our responsibility to share our father’s memoir. We are also aware that history tends to repeat itself. It is thus also our responsibility and the responsibility of children like us to do everything we can to prevent these horrific events from ever happening again.

In helping us to bring our father’s memoir to publication and to the world, we will be forever grateful to Marla and Jay Osborn. Their tireless efforts in preserving the memories and history of those who survived and those who perished are nothing short of heroic, and we remain in their debt.

It is poignant that as we finished preparing this edition of our father’s memoir, we reached the 75th anniversary of the liquidation of the Rohatyn Jewish ghetto, when our father’s mother Toba and his brother Moshe Emanuel were killed along with so many others before his eyes. May their memory be a blessing, now and forever.

Mitchell Glotzer and Terry Glotzer Arons
June 2018

 

Published by the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, (UCHS), Kyiv. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.


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