Local Holocaust Survivor Profiled in New Book

Paul Zilsel is the founder of Left Hand Books in Pike Place, Seattle. At the onset of the Nazi occupation in 1938, Paul fled to England along with other Jewish children. He and his parents ultimately obtained refugee status in the United States, although other family members perished in the Holocaust.

Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism, a new book by Carol Sicherman, describes Paul's resistance to McCarthyism. Sicherman writes that, "Of all the people whom I came to know in the course of my research for the book, he was one of the ones I most wished I had had known. He was, for me, an emblem of moral purity; his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee is a moving example of American idealism." This book has been praised as a must read for people interested in political history.