Roman's Journey

Preface

   Roman Halter is an artist, with a gift not only painting but for words. His memoirs reflect a deep sensitivity to his life and times, which during the Second World War were perilous in the extreme. His memoirs show just how implacable the Nazi enemy could be. It is important that he has now chosen, more than fifty years after the end of the war, to set down his recollections. They are vivid and in many places extremely harrowing.  No one who reads them from cover to cover, lingering over the episodes that are the most dramatic and savage, will have any doubt that the fate of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis was intended to be total destruction.

   It has always been essential, in studying the Holocaust, to recognize the nature of German life before the war, in all its variety and vibranc. Roman Halter's account of his childhood is no mere preface but a portrait-in-the-round of a lost era. Prewar Poland was home to more than three million Jews. In these pages it is the small town of Chodecz, with its eight hundred Jews, that is brought to life. It was a life that the Nazis were destroy utterly.

   The slow but relentless encroachment of German rule after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 is powerfully described. Evil appeared in gradations, starting when Roman Halter and his family were evicted from their home. The rest of the story, of the descent into hell, is described in measured, unambiguous tones. These events impressed themselves on the young boy's mind with fierce clarity. His eyewitness testimony is a record that will live on as a memorial to those who were murdered-- his family and friends, and all the six million Jews-- and as a warning of man's capacity for evil. That capacity to kill and destroy human life did not die when the Second World War came to end in 1945.

   The full panoply of evil is here, wether it is mass murder in the ravine near his hometown of Chodecz itself-- which Roman Halter witnessed-- or the grim circumstances of the Lodz ghetto, or Auschwitz, or Stutthof concentration camp, or slave labor in Dresden, or life in hiding with a courageous German couple, the husband of whom was killed after the war by his neighbors for hiding Jews. It is a disturbing picture. It is also one that needs to be read in every generation, so that no person need ever be in doubt as to the fate of individuals and whole peoples when prejudice, racism, and extremism come to power.

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