There is an extraordinary power to these narratives, which are at times shattering. Unlike the many memoirs that have been written since the war, these accounts have a penetrating power, most likely because of their oral recounting and the freshness of the experiences described.—Studies in Contemporary Jewry

As the title suggests, these narratives are 'fresh' and the acute trauma, pain and anger of the survivors, palpable. It is a book that starkly presents the horrors of war at a micro and individual level and paints a horrific picture of the human capacity for evil. . . . This volume is a rich resource for multi-disciplinary research into the dynamics of conflict.—Ethnic Conflict Research Digest

Fresh Wounds reveals the victims' devastating experiences of pain, loss, and humiliation with compelling authenticity.—Booklist

Provides stark and immediate testimony of the daily life of Jews under the Holocaust, uninfluenced by what Primo Levi recognized as the 'ever more blurred and stylized memories' of survivors who sought to recall the terrible events years or decades later.—AB Bookman's Weekly

Powerful and compelling. Niewyk provides background information and context for these narratives and thus enables the reader to have a coherent narrative of persecution and survival during the Holocaust.—Sybil Milton, former Senior Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Provides an important link in the chain of Holocaust documentation. . . . Raises provocative questions about the way in which we process memories and changes in perspective as we achieve distance from trauma.—Hadassah Magazine

In this truly remarkable work, Donald Niewyk brings to light, fifty years after they were first recorded, the immediate, intense recollections of Holocaust survivors set down in 1945 and 1946 in interviews with the American psychologist David P. Boder—the original, forgotten scholar dedicated to codifying survivor memory for the benefit of history. These Boder interviews are the earliest known attempt by a qualified academic to record systematically the experiences of Jewish survivors. The story of how they were discovered and became a manuscript is a saga as compelling as the information they contain, which confirms with the authenticity of immediacy so much of what we have learned in the half-century since they were recorded. This is an original and substantial addition to the historical literature of the Holocaust.—Charles W. Sydnor Jr., author of Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933-1945