This is the story of a people, its origin, its history, its struggle for survival and its tragic end-the life-and-death story of Polish and other Eastern European Jewries. It is all this and more; more than a mere historical sketch or an episodic narrative of human greatness, more than a record of fighting gallantry and Nazi gore. It is the epic of a people, its prose and its poetry, its piety and devotional consecration, its visions of a heavenly glory in an environment of collective disapproval, its never-fading hopes amidst strains of despair-a people that lived by the book and died by the sword.The vitality of these Jewries in so strange an environment-an underprivileged, underground minority, at best as citizens in exile-has been a puzzle to historians. Somehow their rise did not fit in with orthodox sociological theories or historical precedents. Neither did their tragic end, and while their life was a miracle, their execution is a nightmare which shall not cease plaguing the human mind, if not man's conscience.-From Author's Preface