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The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir

Customer Rating:
This was one of the most powerful memoirs of the many Holocaust stories that I have read. It was difficult to put it down, and when I did, I had to take time out to contemplate what I had just read. One of its strengths is the author's continuous attention to details and facts, giving us a day by day, month by month, and year by year account of what his and his fellow Jews' daily life and subsequent sufferings were like. It is, in fact, so detailed that the reader feels like he/she is right there in his hometown of Tyczyn as he passes his boyhood surrounded by the love of his family....then with the Nazi invasion, the descent into the abyss begins as each day brings new heartbreak, new difficulties. The author has an extraordinary ability to describe emotions so that the reader can feel within himself just how the parents felt, how his fellow prisoners felt as they suffered and were brutally killed.

The memoir is a searing indictment of 2,000 years of Christianity and its utter failure as the fabric of society is torn asunder under the Nazi occupation. The simple one and a half page of the Prologue left me angry and emotional as the author describes how even today the Poles reject any ties to centuries of Jewish culture and their former "neighbors". Throughout this tragic story the author relates in simple but graphic detail how the "Christian" Poles stood by and jeered, laughed, threw stones, and showed utter contempt for the Jews and their terrible suffering as they passed by and were beaten and shot by the German and Ukrainian guards. Even worse were the Poles and Ukrainians who hunted down Jews as they tried to escape and either killed them or turned them into the Gestapo.

The most sobering aspect is that what happened in this book, one man's attempt to survive in conditions so terrible and dehumanizing that it takes courage to even read it all, is that this happened in countless towns, in countless families, to countless innocent men, women, and children simply because they belonged to a group that was condemned. It became "ok" to discriminate, then humiliate, then beat, then kill and finally annihilate. What is the lesson to be learned? The chilling and sad answer is that the world has in many respects learned nothing. This powerful story is an indictment of humanity itself.

MAS

Customer Rating:
The only reason I put this book down was to reflect. This story is so important - I will do as another reviewer suggests - "This book is to be read and passed down to our children to read.
Very powerful.
A suspensful read on a horrific truth.

my soul imprinted

Customer Rating:
The 23rd Psalm is a story that has been imprinted upon my soul, that will remain there as long as I live. I share in the sentiments of Pat's review; I was both compelled to stay in its pages by day and visited with its images at night in my sleep, somehow sharing in this man's plight.

Thank you Mr. Salton for allowing others, for allowing me, into the most private and intimate and horrific memories of your life. I esteem you, and those like you, with the utmost honor. May the Lord cause His face to shine upon you my friend.

Survivor Skills Then, Courage Now

Customer Rating:
It must have taken the author a great deal of inner strength and pain to come to terms with these horrible happenings and be able to put them down on paper to share with all those that read this book. It was amazing that one so young would be quick enough to call on survival skills at the right moment. Though some, of course, was luck, this author displayed a natural instinct to survive throughout his nightmare.

Personal and eye-witness accounts

Customer Rating:
The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir is the chilling personal testimony and memoir of the daily life of George Lucius Salton, a Jewish man who survived the living hell of a Nazi concentration camp. An intense, gripping tale of hatred and power used as a brutal club to perpetrate atrocity, and the author's witness and narration of the unspeakable, The 23rd Psalm is an welcome and invaluable contribution to the growing library of Holocaust Studies. Providing powerful refutations of anti-semitic revisionist historians, these personal and eye-witness accounts are all the more significant in view of the holocaust generation now reaching an age where they are rapidly passing from among us.