Never Far Away
The Auschwitz Chronicles of Anna Heilman

Anna Heilman
Edited by Sheldon Schwartz

About the Book

Anna Heilman was born into the comfort and security of an assimilated Jewish family in prewar Warsaw. Her happy life was shattered when German troops overran Poland in September 1939 and the Jewish people in Warsaw were gradually segregated into a "Jewish Quarter." Anna and her family were captured and taken from this ghetto and shipped first to Majdanek (where her parents were killed almost immediately), and then on to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Anna's sister was hanged by camp authorities in January 1945 for the role she played in blowing up one of Birkenau's crematoria in October of 1944.

Never Far Away provides a unique insight into the courage and ingenuity of the rebels who worked in an armament factory and how they smuggled gunpowder back to their barracks to destroy the gas chambers. The diary's entries reflect an immediacy and a self-conscious awareness of the enormity of what was happening. At the same time, they present the point of view of someone utterly and ultimately powerless to influence this larger course of events. Never Far Away documents the loss of childhood innocence and the triumph of human spirit against crushing oppression. The book contains a foreword by historians Juergen Doerr and Dieter Buse and an afterword by Joel Prager.

"To die for no purpose and to vanish in obscurity is something that Anna cannot accept and live with.... She is driven by the need for justice. But Anna's implicit demand for justice is not simply for her sister. It is for all of the camp inmates that were devoured by flames, destroyed by malnutrition and disease. Justice requires that they be treated as more than a statistic." --Joel Prager, from the "Afterword"

 

About the Author

Anna Heilman obtained a degree in Social Work in Israel and lived in Boston before immigrating to Ottawa, Canada, with her husband Joshua and their two daughters. Anna worked there with the bilingual Children's Aid Society until 1990. She is presently enjoying her well-deserved retirement.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Sheldon Schwartz
• Introduction by Dieter K. Buse and Juergen C. Doerr

• Jews and Poles to 1939
• The Warsaw Ghetto
• Auschwitz
• The Holocaust: Understanding the Incomprehensible
• Memoirs
• Anna Heilmanís Biography before and after Auschwitz
  

• Warsaw before World War II
• The Warsaw Ghetto
• Majdanek
  • Arrival at Majdanek
  • In Majdanek
• Auschwitz
• The October 1944 Uprising
  • Premonition
  • Estusiaís Last Letter
  • The Executions
• The Ghost of the Past is Never Far Away
  
  
• Afterword by Joel Prager
• Index
  
  

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