Back cover:

“The Silence of the Appeared” focuses on the Shoah – the Holocaust – from a humanistic, concrete and personal point of view. The book considers the effects of the Shoah and the consequences of those effects both on the victim-survivors and their children, and how it continues to affect their lives today. Now, after fifty years of silence, many Jewish survivors are eager to share testimony on what they lived through during the Nazi occupation of Europe. The question of the silence is a question in the minds of many of their children. The silence pervades all of society: What has been kept silent? What is it that we shouldn’t know? What are the reasons for the silence? Why do we always speak about the six million who disappeared and not the one million who appeared afterward? What is an appeared person? How have those who were condemned to death gone on living after they re-appeared? When they wonder over and over again, “Why me?” what is the real question?

Diana Wang poses even more questions in this book: What effects has the Shoah had on the children of survivors? How have they metabolized the things they have known about throughout their lives? How have they dealt with the things they weren’t told? Is there such thing as children of survivors syndrome? Are all survivor families the same? How has society  responded in general?

Although the topic is the Shoah, the topic is also about human beings and their conduct under certain conditions of degradation and submission; although the book discusses Jews and Nazis, it also has application to other circumstances, to other countries and populations. Based on testimonies and up-to-date bibliography, we are offered a human mirror, a glance at what is personal and subjective.

This book produces an effect that is both troubling and necessary. The hope is that examination of human conduct in extreme situations presented without prejudice or qualification will contribute to the learning process of future generations.