LastDaysTheresienstadtREVISE3.indd
For years Eva Noack-Mosse tried to convince her cousin, the distinguished University of Wisconsin history professor George Mosse, to publish her concentration camp memoir in the U.S. How appropriate that her account has finally surfaced as part of the UW Press’ George L. Mosse Series. Noack-Mosse tells an unusual Holocaust story. As a Jew married to an “Aryan,” she enjoyed special if precarious status until February 1945, when the Nazi regime began to kill all remaining Jews under their control. Her captivity in Theresienstadt, the camp the Nazis showed to foreign visitors, was less abysmal than that which was endured by Elie Wiesel or most other Holocaust survivors. She had access to a lending library and obtained a mattress in trade for a bread ration. And yet the clock ticked. Sustaining her was the hope that the Third Reich would perish before her turn on the assembly line of death.
