Overview
For young Leibel Sanik, the prosperous Polish city of Piotrkow was like a paradise on earth. The Sanik family lived in a spacious and well-appointed apartment which glowed with the warmth of hospitality joy. Life was secure, comfortable and immensely fulfilling, until German bombs began to fall on the fateful first day of September, 1939.
Someday We'll Be Free is the story of the disintegration of Leibel's beloved world. Through his incredulous eyes, we see the instinctive flight in search of a safe haven that did not exist. We see the return to Piotrkow with its harsh new realities of ghetto life and forced labor. We see the demise of the family, one by one, until only young Leibel and his brother survive the liquidation of Piotrkow and the deportation to the concentration camps. In many ways, Leibel's story mirrors the experiences of many other holocaust survivors. What makes this memoir remarkable, however, is its intense focus on the endless battle against hunger, thirst, cold, disease and exhaustion and on the gradual reduction of existence to its most basic elements, bread, water and life. The tortured Jewish prisoners, shadows of human beings, clung to every moment of agony-filled life as if it were the most precious thing in the world, thinking only about the next piece of bread, the next drink of water, the next moment of life. Someday We'll Be Free, the eight volume in The Holocaust Diaries collection, explores this state of mind and the faint glimmer of hope that sustained it. And through its eloquent descriptions and images, we gain new insight into the character of the survivors of the German death machine; they survived because they clung to the last flickering spark of life with an illogical determination and tenacity, and because liberation came before that spark was extinguished. by Leibel Sanik