Dear Reader,
In the history of the Warsaw Ghetto you can see how truly terrible and how truly magnificent humans can be. All the Jews there were victims of the Nazis, but they acted differently. There were some who sacrificed their own parents just so they could stay alive themselves for a few more days. Yet others, who could have saved their own lives, stayed with their children to their death. There were heroes who took up arms, and heroes who taught the children even though it was punishable by death.
All of these were one part of what inspired me to write this book. The other part was the story of my own family. None of them were in the ghetto of Warsaw. But my father’s father died in the concentration camp at Buchenwald in 1940, and my grandmother died in 1942 in the ghetto of Łódź. As a young man in 1938, my father had to flee from Vienna to Palestine. He had to make similar decisions to those Mira has to make in this novel. He did not fight in the ghetto, but he did fight for Israel’s independence, first in the underground, and later in the military. At some point he decided to no longer bear arms, and he committed himself to the love of his life. He adopted a small girl, my older sister, and he built a family. Despite all the loss and suffering he’d witnessed, he chose life.
Mira, Amos, Daniel, and Hannah are invented figures, but this novel is based on historic facts and eyewitness testimony. Real people did experience things similar to those you have read about. Mira also meets some historic figures, such as the ghetto fighter Mordechai Anielewicz, the fool Rubinstein, and Janusz Korczak, who stayed with the orphans in his charge to their—and his—deaths. I hope that through Mira you experienced a bit what it was like to live and love and fight in the ghetto of Warsaw. That you learned what extraordinary acts humans are capable of, even in the most terrible circumstances. But most of all, how they were still capable of love, just like my father, whose capacity for love could not be destroyed by the Holocaust.
That’s why 28 Days is not just about the past. It’s about all of us. It’s about love, and it’s about those universal questions we all should ask ourselves: What would you do to survive? Would you sacrifice your life for others or would you sacrifice others to save yourself?
And what it really is about is: What kind of human, what kind of mensch do you want to be?
Yours,
David Safier