Introduction to "In Fragile Moments/The Last Time" by Zsuzsanna Fischer Spiro and Eva Shainblum

This volume features the living testimonies of two survivors of the Holocaust in Hungary and of deportation to Auschwitz, Zsuzsanna Fischer Spiro and Eva Shainblum. Today, over seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, as the last survivor witnesses are disappearing, it is particularly urgent to preserve the voices of as many of them as possible. In framing history through these personal experiences it becomes possible to piece together a partial collective autobiography of the victims of the Holocaust. The power of these first-person accounts is not primarily in increasing concrete knowledge of larger historical events, but in providing a picture of how daily life was lived and then suddenly transformed in a flourish, of the Jewish culture that was wiped out during the Holocaust, along with its victims. In the accounts of concentration camp survivors, as opposed to those who survived in hiding, many details recur that are alike because they are documenting a collective fact in a “unity of misery,” and yet each testimony preserves a unique character in the details.