Yitzhak Zuckerman's (Cukierman's) fabulous book stands out in stark contrast to much of the superficial and distorted material that is so often used in Holocaust education. Then again, he was an eyewitness, so he should know. Unlike the anti-Polish slant of most Holocaust educational material, Zuckerman finds much good and bad in both nationalities, and repeatedly sternly warns those who would espouse hatred for Poles. He also has high praises for Zegota, the Polish underground organization that rescued thousands of Jews. Zuckerman is unusually frank and candid in telling the full story of what happened during this cruel time. For instance, Holocaust films invariably show the collaborationist Polish blue police, but not the Jewish ghetto police. Zuckerman, on the other hand, makes it obvious that it was the Jewish collaborationist police which inflicted more of the sufferings on the imprisoned Jews. Most Holocaust materials only show Poles who would betray Jews to the Nazis, while Zuckerman surprises the reader by pointing out that he was just as frequently accosted by Jewish blackmailers as Polish ones. Unlike the movie Schindler's List, which showed a Polish girl cheering as Jews were deported, Zuckerman recounts a diametrically-oppposite personal experience as an incognito Jew (with false documents expertly made by the Polish underground) on the Aryan side of Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was being burned by the Germans, very few Poles rejoiced, and these were primarily from the criminal element. Zuckerman found that many Poles cried as they saw the ghetto burn. Zuckerman also acknowledges that Jews were disproportionately involved in Communism, and this was a major factor which provoked Polish anti-Semitism, including the murder of surviving Jews who returned to reclaim their property after the war. Finally, Zuckerman spends considerable space detailing the many German crimes against Polish gentiles, something which Holocaust materials rarely do in depth, if at all. A superb book!

" I don't think there's any need to analyze the Uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army, and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn't a subject for study in a military school. Not the weapons, not the operations, not the tactics. If there's a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The really important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youths, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising. I don't know if there's a standard to measure that." -Yitzhak Zuckerman From A Surplus of Memory A Surplus of Memory is Yitzhak Zuckerman's memoir of the events of 1939-1946, the period before, during and after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Zuckerman, or "Antek," his pseudonym in the Jewish underground, was a commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which became the primary fighting force in the Jewish ghetto. After the Uprising, Antek led clandestine operations in Aryan Warsaw, then commanded a unit of Jewish fighters during the Polish Uprising. After the war, he helped Jews returning from exile in the Soviet Union from death camps, and those emerging from hiding after the Nazi occupation. Antek became a major figure in Brikha, the movement that smuggled Jews into Palestine after the war. He finally immigrated to Palestine in 1947 and co-founded Lohamei Ha-Getaot, the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz where he established a Holocaust museum. He was also a witness at the trial of Adolph Eichmann. Antek was a member of Zionist youth organizations in Poland before the war. At the age of twenty-four after the blitzkrieg stormed through Poland, he risked his life to travel into the Nazi occupied zone with his destination Warsaw, where he had been summoned to teach by Ha Shomer, a Zionist group. His mission was to help sustain the Jewish educational movement. After all was lost, Antek worked around the clock supporting the exodus of resistance survivors from the inferno of the ghetto to the relative safety of Aryan Warsaw where approximately 20,000 Jews were already in hiding. He arranged for transportation and shelter in temporary apartments for the survivors and devised subterranean escape routes though the sewers where he shepherded the survivors of the carnage. Many escaped via this route with Antek, but other tortured souls lost their way and died horrible deaths in the maze, eaten by rats or swept away by torrents. Others escaped through a tunnel to the other side. Antek continued his activities in the underground, in particular organizing a Jewish unit that fought in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war he stayed in Europe and continued to be an advocate for Jewish survivors. A tragic postwar chapter was his rescue mission to the town of Kielce where sixty Jews had been killed, victims of a pogrom. After the war, surviving Jews were met with hostility and violence when they attempted to return to their homes. Antek led a support contingent of Soviet soldiers and Polish government officials to Kielce and transported Jewish survivors to safety in Lodz. Antek also became a leader in the Brikha movement, smuggling Holocaust survivors into Palestine. During the remainder of his life in Israel, Antek told his stories of the Uprising to those on his kibbutz. He admitted that he suffered from a "surplus of memory," thus the book's title, the result of thirty-eight tapes and sixty hours of conversation. The burden of the events and comrades that lived and died with him in the Warsaw ghetto became more vivid with each passing year. He told friends," I feel in my soul that I'm a thousand years old, since every hour there counts for a year in me." . Antek's survival through the Holocaust and telling his Surplus of Memory were perhaps his greatest act of resistance.This is an essential piece of not only Holocaust history, but in the history of humanity's resistance to oppression. It's a tragic, yet inspiring book.