support of her parents, brothers, and sisters. The Holocaust, however, destroyed her parents, five of her siblings, and more than fifty other family members.
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Helen Sendyk writes in order to bear witness to their memory.
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Like Elie Wiesel, Sendyk rescues from oblivion the memory and images of family members and other victims who perished in the Shoah. She also tells of the horror and suffering which she and others experienced in the kingdom of death; isolation, slave labor, gratuitious violence, the agony of starvation, disease, and the omnipresent fear of extermination were the components employed by National Socialism in its efforts to destroy Jews and degrade familial bonds. Yet, Helen Sendyk's stark and powerful memoir attests to the fact that it was her love of family and desire to once again be united with her parents and siblings that helped her survive. She also writes of the extraordinary acts of friendship in the camps. Nachcia, Helen's older sister, constantly tried to protect her younger sibling during the punishing roll calls. Further, at great risk, the two sisters would smuggle extra portions of "soup" from the kitchen in order to give them to people in their barracks.
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The
End of Days
is aptly titled. In Jewish history this concept conjures an apocalyptic struggle; the war of Gog and Magog, a time of judgment followed by the dawn of a new age. However, the Holocaust literally signified the end of days for the Jewish people in Europe. Here the judgment was cruel and unceasing. But above all else, it was unwarranted. It was a time when the living often envied the dead. Evil reigned unchecked. Yet even in the midst of the routinized terror of the Shoah, Helen muses about her present situation in relationship to the Exodus, the master narrative of the Jewish people. Recalling the family Passover seder and her father's admonition to try and imagine themselves as slaves in Egypt, Sendyk wonders "When will children solemnly sit around a table
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