Chapter by chapter, the author presents a mosaic of stories about life in the Chemnitz Jewish community: his stories touch upon the Jewish upbringing, their organisations and societies, their establishments and cultural associations, the role of foreign Jews in the town, of the individual professional groups such as solicitors and notaries, medics, doctors, dentists and pharmacists and the Jewish art collectors and patrons. The book contains reports about Jewish front-line soldiers from World War One and also examines the warehouses “Tietz” and “Schocken”, which, due to their modern architectural style, left their mark on the cityscape.

The terrible events of “Crystal Night” (9th/10th November 1938) marked the onset of further atrocities as large numbers of Jews were either murdered or expelled from the town. With the aid of numerous records and newspaper reports of personal experiences, the author describes this dark chapter in the community’s history and indeed goes on to talk about the ensuing re-birth of Jewish life in the years of Soviet occupation and the difficulties they experienced in the newly named socialist Karl-Marx-Stadt. A variety of privately-owned photographs and other personal documents allow us a closer look at the day-to-day lives of the Jewish population. An attempt to present the adjoining records of Chemnitz Jewish Cemetery has never before been made and as such is unique.

Historians and representatives of the community have made thorough records of all 1.240 graves which have been chronologically and alphabetically listed in the book. The inscriptions on selected gravestones have been translated from Hebrew into German and are presented in detail with their respective photographs. Thanks to meticulous research into many family histories, the author has been able to include interesting anecdotes about individual families up to the present day. Apart from the names of those people buried in the cemetery and those remembered by members of the community who were interviewed, an extensive list of names also includes the names of those Jewish front-line soldiers from the Chemnitz district who fell during World War One, the names of the Russian Jewish prisoners of war, of those forced into hard labour, of Jews from Chemnitz who were forced to leave the country and go to Poland, of those who were arrested during Crystal Night as well as the names of those from Chemnitz who were deported to other places. Each page tells the story of their fates. Putting together a book with such content serves to honour the Jewish community but it also provides a profound source of research material to the descendants of these people who are now scattered across the globe.