We Must Not Think of Ourselves

Heartbreaking account of the Jewish people in Poland who were forced from their homes to move to the Warsaw ghetto. During this time, Adam Paskow, a widower, is asked to take testimony from people to preserve the experience of living in the ghetto for history to remember them. He agrees, and he takes interviews of his young students to whom he is teaching English.
When he is moved to the ghetto, he is put in an apartment with two families. One of the mothers in the apartment, Sala, and Adam become friendly and fall in love. Adam desperately misses his deceased wife, who was Catholic, but takes comfort in Sala's arms.
As Adam attempts to escape the ghetto, he has to make a heart-wrenching decision on who to save. This is a book that will stay with me a long time. It is based on true events and was inspired by a true project.

Based on all the books I've read about WWI and WWII, there were apparently no boundaries to the cruelties inflicted by the Nazis. This book takes place in 1941and 1942 inside the Warsaw ghetto and is told in the first person by Adam Paskow, a Polish teacher and widower.

Adam is a 42-year-old living in a one-bedroom apartment with two families, previously strangers, so they number in 10 tight quarters. Conditions are harsh and food is scare for everyone living in the ghetto under the watchful, cruel eyes of the German police. He does his best to teach any interested children in a makeshift room, and also works for one of the Jewish agencies serving in a soup kitchen. He agrees to interview people in the ghetto about their lives both before and after the war.

This book is well researched and tells the truly heartbreaking stories of Jewish people confined to the ghetto, many of whom were deported to concentration camps. Those who remained were subjected to heartless treatment by Germans. The telling of the stories is difficult to read, but we must in order to honor those who survived and those who perished.

This well written and well researched novel is a look inside the day to day life of the Jewish people inside the Warsaw Ghetto. It is based on the Oneg Shabbot organization that interviewed people in the ghetto who wanted their stories to survive the war and tell the real story of their lives in captivity.

Adam is 42 years old and his beloved spouse had died several years before. She had been from a very rich Polish family and her father convinced Adam that he would help him. In reality, he tricked Adam and took his home and made arrangements for Adam to go live in the Warsaw ghetto where he was forced to live in a small apartment with two families - a total of 10 people. He teaches school for some of the children and works in one of the Jewish agencies., When he's approached by the head of a secret group, he's asked to help them interview people in the Ghetto to get the story of their lives both inside their day to day lives in the ghetto as well as their lives in Warsaw before the war. He begins to document the stories of his friends, students and other people that he meets. One of the people he interviews is the wife of one of the families that he shares an apartment with. She is the mother of two boys and she and Adam fall in love. In 1942, the Germans started to liquidate the Ghetto and send the inhabitants to 'work camps' that were really concentration camps where many of them were put to death. When Adam finds out that there is a possibility of escaping from the ghetto, he has to decide if he'll take a chance and who he will take with him?

This book is well researched. Using some of the interviews from the archives, the readers get a close look at what life was really like for the Jewish people crowded into a small space and policed by German soldiers many of whom enjoyed punishing and torturing the inhabitants. Adam is a complex character who tries to make the best of his life even though he sees very little future for many of the people he deals with.


I read a lot of World War II fiction and this is the first time I've read about the underground group who interviewed so many inhabitants to the Warsaw Ghetto. Many of the documents survived the war and are on display at a museum in Warsaw.

Author Lauren Grodstein believes that had her great-grandparents not left Warsaw twenty years before World War II, she likely would not have been born. She first learned about the Oneg Shabbat Archive in 2019 when she traveled to Poland with her family and they “stumbled into” the Archive, one wall of which bears the words “What we’ve unable to shout out to the world.” Displayed there are notebooks, paintings and drawings, and one of the large milk cans in which those documents were buried so that they, fortunately, withstood the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Grodstein recalls that as they were leaving, she observed, “There are a thousand novels in that room,” to which her sister replied, “Maybe you should write one.” She then spent a full year researching and pondering the story because she wanted to be sure she could “do justice to those people and their stories, and honor them.”

“It is up to us to write our own history. Deny the Germans the last word.” We Must Not Think of Ourselves opens with that December 1940 entreaty to fictional Adam Paskow. He is enlisted to record “all the details, even if they seem insignificant,” as part of an archival project so that after World War II, the world will know “the truth about what happened.” Adam agrees, accepting the risk that if his activities are discovered, he will likely be executed. The archive group is called Oneg Shabbat, meaning “the joy of the Sabbath.”

Adam begins with his own history. In a first-person narrative, he explains that he is a Jewish English teacher living in a cramped apartment with two other families, teaching about four to six students in the basement of a bombed-out movie theater. He met his wife, Kasia, when they were both studying English literature in college. She was the Catholic daughter of a wealthy and influential official with the Polish government. They married in 1930 and were happy, even though they were never able to have children, until she died tragically. Even after her death, her father, Henryk, who at least ostensibly accepted his daughter’s marriage to a Jewish man, continued serving as Adam’s benefactor, enabling him to continue residing in their stylish apartment on his public teacher’s salary. After being forced to relocate to the Ghetto, Adam resolved to continue teaching, despite having no novels, short stories, or textbooks, and committed to assigning to his pupils only uplifting and joyous poems that he memorized over the years. His students attend class sporadically, largely because they are often engaging in forbidden bartering or stealing in an effort to gather enough food for their families to survive.

A year after Germany invaded Poland, Adam still struggles to understand world events and the purported logic behind them. He remains understandably baffled by the bombardment and decimation of his homeland, and the unbridled atrocities he has already witnessed. He cannot fathom what the Polish people may have done to provoke the “terrorizing of children, the stabbing of old men on the streets, the rape of our young women, and the public hanging of our soldiers.” He could have fled to Palestine to reside with his brother and mother, but like so many others, he stayed. “We had our lives and our livelihoods, and couldn’t envision starting over somewhere” else. “I’ll wait for the Allies, I suppose,” Adam told his father-in-law, when Henryk offered to secure a Polish kennkarte (passport) for him. (Henryk suspiciously sought to retrieve jewelry he gifted Kasia -- items Adam viewed as a potential safety net) Adam could not foresee, of course, that the Germans would rob him and his fellow Jews of much more than their money, prohibiting them from practicing their professions, forcing them out of their homes and synagogues, denying them basic civil rights, and, finally, taking their freedom, insisting they had to be relocated because they “carried disease.” Only when Adam arrives at his new apartment does he realize that he has been double-crossed by Henryk and the apartment he believed he would solely occupy will, in fact, also be home to the Lescovec and Wiskoff families and their total of five rambunctious sons. With no options, they all agree “to try to live our lives peaceably . . . until a better situation presents itself.” The gates to the new district in which they are forced to reside were locked on November 16, 1940.

To relate the stories of those he interviews for the project, Grodstein includes Adam’s notes. Their histories are fascinating, absorbing, and largely heartbreaking. As the days pass, their living conditions worsen and they do not have enough food. But there is a black market and Adam saved some valuable items to trade, a dangerous endeavor, in order to help feed the children who are part of his household. Adam’s narrative is straightforward and candid, his descriptions of the horrors of life in the Ghetto and the brutalities he witnesses unsparing, but essential to an understanding of his experiences and emotions.

Adam is principled, dedicated to his students, and likable. His story is completely gripping and sympathetic. His naivete is evident, as Grodstein illustrates, in part, through his interactions with other characters. He grows close to his housemates, especially Sala Wiskoff, who is focused on keeping her two sons alive. They are actively smuggling food, while her husband, Emil, has been leveled by grief over the death of his mother. Sala ponders whether they are “really are just waiting here to die.” Adam rationalizes that “they can’t kill all of us. What would be the gain in that? It’s illogical. And the Nazis pride themselves on being logical.” Isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, Adam and his fellow prisoners in the Ghetto have no idea what is actually taking place beyond the locked gates. But their musings and struggle to find reason in a world gone mad is fascinating, thought-provoking, and enlightening, especially when considered through the lens of history.

Grodstein has deftly created a cast of vibrant characters whose stories are mesmerizing. Szifra Joseph, a beautiful and intelligent fifteen-year-old who was Adam’s student before the war, is one of the most memorable. Her family was wealthy – her father owned a clothing factory which was commandeered by the Germans – but now her mother, on the verge of complete mental collapse, toils in a brush factory and her younger brothers risk their lives foraging for food. Her family has connections to the Warner Brothers in Hollywood, and she plans to use those connections to make her way to California once the Ghetto is liberated. Because of all she has been through, she is angry, outspoken, cynical, and jaded. She believes she can secure her family’s safety through manipulation and persuasion, relying on her charms to gain favor with their captors. She is certain she can obtain kennkartes that will enable them to escape. “It is my choice to take charge of my life and my goals and protect my family and rely on the good graces of whomever can help me,” she tells Afam.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves is moving and emotionally impactful because, remarkably, Grodstein manages, seemingly effortlessly, to craft an engrossing story that is both uplifting and life-affirming. Despite everything he must ensure, Adam finds love and it helps sustain him as, with each passing day, matters grow more dire. The relationship is undeniably born from the circumstances in which Adam and the woman find themselves, but the ways in which they cling to and comfort each other are believable, understandable, and deeply affecting. Grodstein says it was “very important to me to shine a light in the darkness. Even with material as serious as this, to provide some sense that life could get better at the end.” Indeed, as the late Harvey Milk wisely observed, “You cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.” Despite his experiences, Adam – in part because he is too naïve and inherently decent to imagine the extent and types of evil the Nazis will eventually unleash – is able to maintain hope that the Allies will in fact rescue him and the others. His commitment to the archive is evidence of his optimism and belief that the world will someday know the truth about exactly what transpired in the Ghetto. Which is not to say that his confidence is unfailing. He fights not to fall into permanent dispair, at one point convinced that "we are creating a portrait of Polish Jews at the end of our history.” However, Grodstein credibly shows that holding on to optimism and hope leads to triumph, even if not without sacrifice.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves is one of the best books of 2023, a stand-out tale on bookshelves crowded with volumes of World War II historical fiction. Grodstein elevates the genre because of the compassionate, measured, and seamless way she relates the various ways in which Adam and the other characters refuse to give up, give in, or relinquish their identities and histories . . . or abandon their commitment to the truth. In addition to being an absorbing and deeply moving exploration of events that occurred in a particular time and place to a specific group of people, it is also both contemporary and timely, a warning against complacency and a conviction that history is incapable of repeating itself. She says her motivation for penning the book was a “desire to honor those who remained, who died, and who left us their words. . . . I did my best to hear, and to share, what they could not shout out to the world.” We Must Not Think of Ourselves is inarguably the loving and riveting homage she envisioned.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy and BookBrowse for a physical copy of the book in conjunction with its First Impressions program.

Adam has been approached by someone he is not familiar with. This person has a strange request. He wants Adam to start documenting the testimonies from his students, friends and neighbors. Adam learns their fears and dreams and he also learns about their survival techniques in the Warsaw ghetto.

This is more of a 3.5 star read, rounded up. Yes, I know I am in the minority on this book! This book moved slowly in many places and there are quite a few characters, and to be honest, I just did not feel a connection with any of them. I think it is more of the layout of the book, the diary format. I do think it is important testimony. I just needed more emotion.

I did learn a few things and this is always important to me. I knew a lot occurred with many Jews turning on other Jews. This book brings a lot of this to light. Sometimes when you read a Holocaust novel, the bad people who are not Nazis, are not really brought to the attention of the reader. This story talks about it all.

Need a different WWII story…THIS IS IT! Grab your copy today n

I received this novel from the publisher for a honest review.

4.5⭐️

Inspired by the stories from the real Oneg Shabbat archives, We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein takes us into the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII.

As the novel begins, we meet forty-two-year-old Adam Paskow in 1940, a widower who had been married to a Polish woman from an affluent family and was once a foreign language teacher at the Centralny Lyceum. Tricked by his former father-in-law to surrender his home and move to the ghetto as the Nazi occupiers began displacing Jews from their homes, Adam is forced to share a small apartment with two families- a total of ten people sharing the same home. Adam teaches English to the boys and girls in the Ghetto and works shifts at the Aid Society kitchens. He is approached by the head of a secret group of archivists, the Oneg Shabbat ( Joy of the Sabbath), to join in their efforts to document life in the ghetto and the stories of the men women and children forced out of their own homes and imprisoned in the ghetto with even less the bare minimum resources to survive.

We follow Adam as he begins documenting life in the ghettos. The narrative is comprised of his interviews with his students, their families and his friends – inhabitants of the Ghetto from different backgrounds who share their stories and Adam’s own story and his account of daily life – his interactions with his students whose morale he tries to boost, the struggle for sustenance, the “smuggling” of food and other necessities from outside the of gates of the ghetto by the youngsters, the desperate measures people turn to for securing papers and a way out and much more. In 1942, when “resettlement” to the concentration camps begins with 6000 people being transported every day, Adam knows that he must do whatever he can to find a way out of the Ghetto to save himself and those close to him before it was too late.

Though this is a fictionalized account based on the Oneg Shabbat archives, some real characters also make their appearance in the narrative. The tone of the narrative is matter-of-fact and occasionally dispassionate but paints a vivid picture of the horrific condition of life in the Warsaw Ghetto and the fear, anger and pain of those struggling to survive. The author also captures the resilience of the human spirit in brief moments of hope, joy, friendship and love that provide brief respite and the will to survive amid all the darkness and suffering.

Exceptionally well-written, brutally honest, factual and informative, this is a heavy read that will break your heart - a must-read for those interested in Holocaust literature. Though I have read stories set in the Warsaw Ghetto before, this is the first time I read anything about the real archivists whose written accounts help to shed light on an important part of history. Do read the Afterword where the author briefly discusses her inspiration for this novel.

“I will admit that as I have collected testimonies for this archive, I have not always understood what the point of the archive was, or I have seen it in the mildest of terms: that the Oneg Shabbat group has been creating a collective portrait of Polish Jews at this peculiar moment in our history so that we remember what really happened, inscribing the truth of what we went through so that liberation wouldn’t erase our memories.

But now I realize that we are creating a portrait of Polish Jews at the end of our history— not one peculiar moment, but the very last moment. It is yet another surprise that it has taken me so long to understand that. When this is over, there will be no more of us. Even among the survivors, should there be any survivors, there will be no more of us.”

Many thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.