The Janowska Road

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. good. ix, [3], 305,[3] pages. Maps. Top edge of rear board worn, boards slightly scuffed and soiled. Leon Weliczker Wells (born March 10, 1925 in Stojaniw near Radziechów, then Poland, died December 19, 2009) was an American engineer. Between 1942 and 1944, he was imprisoned in the Lemberg- Janowska Forced Labor Camp. He had to burn the bodies of Nazi victims. After the liberation of Lemberg by the Red Army in April 1944 Weliczker worked in the materials business of the Ukrainian Railway Administration in Lviv and undertook procurement trips to Kiev and Moscow. With the Soviet historian Vladimir Pavlovich Belyayev, he discussed a contribution to a publication on the massacre of the Polish university professors in Lvov, whose bodies were also burned by the Sonderkommando. Wells claims that the 38 people were identified before their bodies were burned, and named some of them: Kazimierz Bartel, Tadeusz Ostrowski, W odzimierz Sto ek and Tadeusz Boy- ele ski. The Janowska Road, by Leon Weliczker Wells remains one of the most important accounts of Jewish life during the Holocaust. The book is the harrowing account of Wells' experiences from his sixteenth to his twentieth year in Lvov, Poland, from 1941-1945. Most of that time was spent as a prisoner in the Janowska concentration camp. Wells would later testify that he was the only member of his family, including his parents, six siblings, cousins and uncles, numbering 76 in all, to survive the Holocaust. He survived by becoming part of the "Death Brigade" at Janowska, whose job it was to obliterate, with bonfires and bone-crushers, the evidence of the Third Reich's guilt: thousands upon thousands of human corpses. Following the war, Wells emigrated to the United States.