I have always wanted to chronicle my experiences during the Shoah years. In the early 1940s, while hiding in Hungary, I did start a journal, but of course those pages were lost during the war. When my wife and I came to the United States, our first order of business was to support ourselves and, later, our children. Over many years, I harbored the desire to record my bitter past, yet as time went by, I simply could not take pen in hand. I kept actively postponing the task, day after day, week after week.

I finally began to chronicle my story in January 1986. Writing Yiddish in longhand on the pages of a bound notebook, I recorded a series of memories about my birthplace, my family and my early schooling. I worked through that August and produced only a fraction of the manuscript, and then neglected the project entirely until January 1990 -- a hiatus of almost three and a half years. From January to March of 1990, I added only a few more paragraphs. Ultimately, despite my self-generated interruptions and the passage of time, I found the strength to finish documenting my story. I was able, as they say in Yiddish, a rup redden fun hartzen, "to talk it out from the heart."

Eventually I filled over 625 handwritten pages with my reminiscences, primarily in Yiddish but with liberal doses of Hebrew and smatterings of Polish, German, Hungarian and Russian. Then, working with a stack of language dictionaries, I translated the manuscript into English. I kept many Yiddish and Hebrew words and phrases, to perpetuate the flavor of my birthplace, the Carpathian region. I dictated this story, sentence by sentence, into a tape recorder. My daughter then saw to it that all 22 tape cassettes were transcribed. From there, my son reorganized the original manuscript chronologically, rewrote passages, trimmed repetitious material and raised editorial questions about details I had overlooked.

We enlisted the help of two outside editors who made invaluable suggestions affecting the manuscript's tone and readability. Finally, my children worked with me to smooth the language in the final version, polish the transliterations, finish the glossary and fill in as many missing facts as we could.

Although my writing consists mainly of personal experiences, I nevertheless believe my Shoah memoir has general, especially Jewish, significance. I had no literary ambitions in recounting my own bitter memories. My intent has always been to leave this text for my children and grandchildren -- stories I had great difficulty relating because I bear the Shoah's indelible stain. Through these writings, I hope to communicate my experiences for everlasting memory, and to serve as a warning for the coming generations.