[Rarebooks] I Did Not Interview the Dead -Early Holocaust Book

[Joslin Hall Rare Books, ABAA]

Boder, Dr. David. I DID NOT INTERVIEW THE DEAD. Urbana; University of
Illinois Press: 1949. 1st edition. The very first work on the experiences
of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, put together before it was even
called by that name.

In 1946 Dr. David Pablo Boder, a Latvian-born psychology professor at the
Illinois Institute of Technology, who had trained in Germany and spoke
both Russian and Yiddish, decided to go to Europe and conduct taped
interviews with "displaced persons" who had just been released from the
death camps. This was made possible through a new technology- a (semi)
portable wire recorder developed by Marvin Camras. Loaded down with the
recorder, 200 spools of carbon steel wire, cases of converters and
transformers and a pocketful of visas, Boder recorded 120 hours of
interviews with 109 survivors.

Seventy of these interviews were translated and transcribed, and seven
complete and one edited interview were included in this book, along with
Boder's brief account of his trip and how he conducted the interviews.
These remain important as the only systematic interviews conducted with
survivors who had not had a chance to put their experiences into the
larger perspective which the following decades would bring. Most Holocaust
recollections have been gathered decades after the war; Boder's were
gathered before the term "Holocaust" had even come into use.

Sadly, Boder's work went largely unappreciated and was basically ignored
and forgotten until just a few years ago. Today most of the recordings
have been made available through a foundation dedicated to their
preservation, and last year NPR's "This American Life" featured a story on
Professor David Boder and his long-forgotten recordings. Boder ended the
Introduction to this book by explaining the somewhat enigmatic title-

"The verbatim records presented in this book make uneasy reading. And yet
they are not the grimmest stories that could be told -I did not interview
the dead."

Hardcover. 6"x9.25", xix + 220 pages; grey cloth with a design of
barbed-wire strands; original black dust jacket with stylized camp
prisoner behind barbed wire; jacket with slight chips and a little wear,
but overall very, very nice; book near fine. The nicest copy I have ever
seen. [05101] $325.00

Illustration-
<http://www.joslinhall.com/images03/th-05101.jpg>


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