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[Page 13]

Dedication

Unhealed wounds, ceaseless grief, figures of dear souls-parents, brothers, sisters, women and children, who accompany the shadows by day and their dreams at night-the picture of a brotherly Jewish society which was destroyed by the Nazi murders-all this had inspired the tiny scattered remnants to create for Olshan a memorial book.

We know it is beyond our power to tell it all, despite our longing and memories of everything that's now gone. Could anyone really convey the unspeakable horrors they have seen? Is it possible to portray the reality of a Jewish shtetl in a foreign land where such a spirit was nurtured despite being an expelled people?

But is this possible, cry the survivors, that everything should remain erased, disappeared as if it never existed? Without a memorial, without a grave-stone?

Yet they came together, the few suffering exhausted remnants, heart-broken, each one weeping inside, on this hallowed mission which has become their duty. They won't forget, they can't forget, they will speak from their hearts, their tongues, they will speak to themselves, to their dead ones, their children-each will tell about their fates, especially to their children and to future generations. They do not wish only to lament what they have lost and will never recover or to pour out their bitter hearts, that can never be consoled. This narrative of their experiences is for their children, their children's children and the whole world, to those who have found a safe and peaceful home overseas and those who have found refuge in the free independent Jewish historic home.

May they all know their heritage, and remember that they are children of a people who could not be torn from their roots and their sacred national identity by thousands of years of hostile enmity. In their 3000 year history, including chapters of heroic struggle, chapters of God's grace, up to the last terrible fate, unique in world history, in which so many have perished at the hands of a fanatical enemy intent on their destruction.

And let the children in Israel know and understand that their parents' blood, crying out everywhere, just like their brothers' blood cries out from Israel's land-together these are the price paid for their physical and spiritual freedom, and will always remain as a memorial for the Jewish people.

 

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