There Once Was a World

This is the history of a singular yet representative Jewish community from its origins in the Middle Ages to its destruction during the Second World War. For 900 years, this Polish shtetl was a home to generations of Jewish families. In 1944, almost every Jew in Eishyshok was murdered, and with them died a way of life that had survived since the eleventh century. Yaffa Eliach was four years old when the Nazis entered the town and machine-gunned all but thirty-six of its inhabitants. She and her family hid for two years in forests and in a tiny cellar beneath a pigsty. She has devoted the last seventeen years to documenting the stories of the other inhabitants of Eishyshok, collecting thousands of photographs and personal stories from all over the world. The result is this extraordinary book, which weaves these stories into a comprehensive and moving study of shtetl life and culture. Yaffa Eliach has written a landmark history that triumphantly brings to life a people and a world the Nazis sought to destroy.