TO OUR BIALYSTOKER LANDSLEIT AND FRIENDS At last, after arduous effort, we present our landsleit and friends with this Bialystoker Memorial Book, to honor our once vibrant hometown and the brave resistance and ultimate destruction of its great Jewish commiunity. Our landsmanschaft was unable to publish this book earlier, as planned. At the 1970 Bialystoker world convention in Israel, it was decided to issue a memorial book as soon as possible. In the following years, our Center in New York carried on negotiations with our counterparts in Israel to prepare and issue the book jointly. Regrettably, this attempt at collaboration failed. Nevertheless, we were not discouraged and took it upon ourselves — as a sacred task — to publish the volume. We knew in advance the difficulties that lay ahead, and that did, in fact, materialize. The Bialystoker Memorial Book appears at a time of resurgent neo-Nazism, anti- Semitism and increasing worldwide opposition to the State of Israel from the political left and right. Furthermore, we have witnessed the spectacle of so-called ‘experts’ — some respectable academicians among them — denying the Holocaust ever occurred and minimizing the extent of Jewish victimization. We can expect such denials to continue. This book contains eyewitness accounts of the brutality and suffering; Bialystok is an example of what went on in Europe during the late 1930s and 1940s. We hope we have made it harder for the falsifiers of history to do their work. Although much has been written about the Jewish community of Bialystok, its destruction and the resistance, this volume has gathered scattered articles and documents into one anthology. It wasn’t easy to organize them into a coherent unit. We hope the Bialystoker Memorial Book will serve as a worthy monument to Jewish Bialystok, whose memory remains so precious to us. We have not been content to provide just the history of Bialystok, its development and, finally, its end in the Holocaust. We have also included the story of how surviving Bialy- stoker Jews tried to rebuild their community — to no avail — after the war. And we have traced to the present day the activities of landsleit in the United States, Israel, Argentina and France, which demonstrate the unconquerable Bialystoker spirit. Had this volume been published ten years ago, it would have included the valuable perspectives of many who are no longer with us. Nevertheless, we believe we have faithfully presented a comprehensive and accurate picture. Many thanks to our wonderful supporters, who responded generously to the appeal of our Board of Governors for financial assistance. We wish to credit the following individuals, whose participation in the project was indispensable: Max Ratner of Cleveland, our distinguished Bialystoker landsman and leading activist in the American Jewish community, who was the driving force behind this book; /zaak Rybal-RybalowskKi, General Secretary of the Bialystoker Center, Home and Infirmary for the Aged, who invested much time and energy in _ the preparation of the volume; J. Shmulewitz, the well-known Yiddish journalist and specialist on Holocaust themes, who edited the Yiddish manuscript of the volume; Rabbi Lowell S. Kronick, who rendered the English translation, making the book accessible to the children and grandchildren of survivors; Hirsh Gansbourg of Empire Press, whose expertise as a printer guaranteed the quality of the production; Louis Evans, a master Yiddish proofreader, whose attention to detail assured the accuracy of the Yiddish manuscript; and V