http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/62527940

I did not interview the Dead. [Records of interviews with displaced persons.]

"A few days before the surrender of Germany, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, sent out a call to American newspaper editors which may be paraphrased as "Come and see for yourselves." Eisenhower, preoccupied as he must have been with unprecedented responsibilities, found time to reflect upon the significance of preserving for posterity the impressions and emotions aroused by the sight of thousands of victims dead or dying in the liberated concentration camps in Germany. Upon reading Eisenhower's call to the American press, it occurred to me that the magnetic wire recorder, then a new tool which had been developed by the Armour Research Foundation, offered a unique and exact means of recording the experiences of displaced persons. Through the wire recorder the displaced person could relate in his own language and in his own voice the story of his concentration camp life. Many of the following recorded personal documents describe the gradual cutting down of a human being to fit into concentration and annihilation camps. To describe this process I have had to coin the antonym to the term acculturation, for what is dealt with here is an unprecedented and planned deculturation of personality on a mass scale. The verbatim records presented in this book make uneasy reading"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

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