Escape from the Pit

Originally published in Hebrew in 1944, this fascinating and moving account may well be the first memoir of the Holocaust. At the end of 1944, while World War II was still raging, nineteen-year-old Renia Kukielka published her Hebrew language memoir about the Holocaust. The account may well be the first of its kind. In her powerful and raw story, she portrays life in the ghettos and her three years of wandering in disguise as a Polish Catholic, trying to escape from the German onslaught. She also recounts how she served for almost a year as a courier between ghettos for the Zionist youth movement's underground cell in Bendzin, carrying weapons, money, and messages, until she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. She was tortured in a high-security prison, but, after a daring escape, she was able to flee to British Mandate Palestine with other members of the resistance. Kukielka's memoir manages to combine both immediacy and hindsight. It stands out for its descriptions of life and