Last year, two memoirs were published in Melbourne. Abraham Biderman’s The World of my Past and Mark Verstandig’s I rest my case should be read together and alongside Roman Visniac’s photographic record, A Vanished World. As intricate depictions of Polish Jewish life before the Holocaust and as intimate memorials to family and friends, they are monuments to the persistence of memory. But they also have an importance beyond that of individual recollections because of the contrasting insights they offer into the paths to, and resistance against, genocide in rural and urban Poland. Birdman, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto in a city once home to some 250,000 Jews, was incarcerated in a series of concentration camps before his ultimate release from Bergen-Belsen. Verstandig is one of the few thousand Jews who survived in hiding in the Polish countryside, which makes his account a relatively rare and important historic record.