Review of I Promised I Would Tell by Sonia Weitz

“Their cries of longing and our screams of terror formed a chorus of inhuman sounds that filled the universe, but no one heard those awful sounds, except for us. I know this is true because no one answered. We had been abandoned by the world.”
- Sonia Weitz


If one were to read “The Hangman,” they would think that no one else could write something that would express the negative effect bystanders have in violent situations. Watching “Schindler’s List”, one might think that nowhere else could they see or visualize the horrors committed by the Nazis upon the Jewish people. In both the audience is drawn to inevitably hate the perpetrators and bystanders, while sympathizing with the victims. I Promised I Would Tell evokes a different kind of sensory experience. While Weitz does write of the atrocities committed and her experiences in a labor & death camps (no doubt interacting with some of the so-called, “Schindler Jews”), her words urge you to feel pity for the extreme levels of inhumanity and immorality that the perpetrators sank to. It is a similar sentiment one might have when considering the moral decay of slave masters of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as detailed by Harriet Beecher Stowe and others.

I marvel at how life’s simplest pleasures brought moments of joy and reprieve from the insanity of life under the Nazis - the ability to fall in love, write in one’s diary, listen to music, and dance with someone you love. Weitz, even in the prose sections of her book, finds a way to make everyday experiences lyrical, lovable and memorable. In this way, they live on for her, those that survived it with her and for those of us lucky enough to read about it.

Although her words now serve as evidence of a horrible crime against humanity, Sonia’s diary no longer exists. She burned it while in camp after reading passages to her fellow inmates, but it was not done so in vain. This “record of her young life” has been resurrected from the ashes, like a mighty phoenix, in the publishing of this book. In the camp, her diary provided emotional, spiritual and ultimately, physical warmth for all her heard it. We are privileged to be able to have a semblance of that experience today.

Like a scientist witnessing the results of an experiment gone terribly wrong, Sonia Weitz carefully observed the horrors afflicting her family, her friends and her people. In light of the ban on writing supplies to Jews, she recorded these observations in the recesses of her mind - her subconscious. Over time, she recalled these horrific events back into the present as one would call up details from a computer’s memory. She promised her mother that she would tell and she has – poignantly, powerfully and poetically.

Weitz, in considering the inhumanity towards the Jews asks – “How dehumanized can we become? Is there no limit to the depth of our misery?” These are questions that still go unanswered as we look at world history since the Holocaust and see more senseless genocides.