Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 11 hours ago
Dr. Joanna Sliwá joined the LBI Book Club in January to discuss the book It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival by Leon Thorne.
It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.
Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.
(Rutgers University Press)
Leon Thorne was a rabbi from Schodnica, near Drohobycz, in Austrian Galicia. He trained at the Breslau Seminary. Following the Holocaust, he served the post-war Jewish community of Frankfurt as a rabbi before immigrating to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, New York.
Dr. Joanna Sliwá joined the LBI Book Club in January to discuss the book It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival by Leon Thorne.
It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.
Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.
(Rutgers University Press)
Leon Thorne was a rabbi from Schodnica, near Drohobycz, in Austrian Galicia. He trained at the Breslau Seminary. Following the Holocaust, he served the post-war Jewish community of Frankfurt as a rabbi before immigrating to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, New York.
