Scrolls of Testimony is a profoundly moving chronicle of the Holocaust. The author, award-winning Israeli writer Abba Kovner, intended this book as an almost liturgical account of the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish people, and he wrote it in the Jewish tradition of megillot, or scrolls. Taken together, the pages are reminiscent of the Talmud, with the central text surrounded by notes and excerpts of poetry and prose.

 

Scrolls of Testimony reads like a suspense novel - powerful, dramatic and compelling - but it is more than that. It is the testimony of the author woven with others’ eyewitness accounts, diary entries, poems, and even last wills and testaments. Many of these were carefully recorded and hidden during the war at great personal risk to the writers, who desperately wanted to record the unfathomable events unfolding around them.