For decades I was silent

"In 1939, Baruch Goldstein was a religiously observant adolescent member of the Jewish community in Mlawa, a town that was then in East Prussia. Even after war broke out, the Jewish community there was relatively sheltered, as that region was incorporated into the German Reich rather than into the General Government (the German-run fragment of pre-war Poland, where conditions were harsh for everyone). However, in 1942, Goldstein was sent to Auschwitz, where he stayed two-and-a-half years. His family was all scattered to their deaths, but he survived the war - barely. For Decades I Was Silent is an account of life in a small Polish-German town and provides information on the religious life of the Jewish citizens. This book creates a direct sense of the random, mystifying personal violence individuals felt at the hands of Germans - not the anonymous industrial death machine, but immediate, face-to-face violence."--BOOK JACKET.