Smith, Lyn 1934–

PERSONAL:

Born 1934. Education: Earned B.A. (honours) and M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Lewes, England. Office—Open University, P.O. Box 197, Milton Keynes MK7 6BJ, England. E-mail—lsmith@webster.edu.

CAREER:

University of Sussex, Brighton, England, served as tutor at Centre for Continuing Education; Imperial War Museum, London, England, interviewer for Holocaust Sound Archive, beginning in 1970s; Open University, Milton Keynes, England, lecturer in international politics. Webster University, adjunct professor of politics, international relations, and human rights; also affiliated with Regents College.

WRITINGS:

Pacifists in Action: The Experience of the Friends Ambulance Unit in the Second World War, Sessions Book Trust (York, England), 1998.

Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived, Ebury Press (London, England), 2005, published as Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust; A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived, Carroll & Graf Publishers (New York, NY), 2006.

Young Voices: British Children Remember the Second World War, Viking (London, England), 2007.

Interviewer for sound recording Lyn Smith Cuba Collection: Oral Histories of Cuban Women, ninety-two tape reels, 1988. Contributor to periodicals, including Millennium.

ADAPTATIONS:

Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived was released as an audiobook, narrated by Andrew Sachs, RH Audio, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

While working for the Imperial War Museum in London, England, Lyn Smith spent decades recording the oral recollections of people who lived through World War II. She focused particularly on the oppression and execution of millions of Jews and others under Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany (now known as the Holocaust) in her second book, published in England as Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived and in the United States as Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust; A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived. It is "an extraordinary book," according to BBC News writer Richard Allen Greene, bringing together the words of witnesses as well as survivors of persecutions, ghettos, death marches, and concentration camps. Smith told Greene, "It is as near as you can possibly get to first-hand views of the Holocaust." A Publishers Weekly reviewer echoed Greene's description and added that the book is "a reminder of the power of individual stories, which can bring home the horrors of WWII more forcefully than abstract numbers." The book became a best seller.

The wartime experiences of British children became the focus of Smith's next book, Young Voices: British Children Remember the Second World War. Some of the people interviewed had been on a passenger ship torpedoed by a German submarine; others had been evacuated from the city to the countryside for safety. Still others told of being bicycle messengers in bombed-out cities or of gathering rose hips—the fruit of a rose bush after the flower has bloomed—from which the government could make a syrup full of vitamin C. Reviewing the work for the Spectator, Philip Ziegler noted that oral testimony is frequently unreliable in the factual details of events, but that "as a picture of how people felt, of the atmosphere of the times," books such as Smith's "come as near the truth as one can get." Lucy Lethbridge in the New Statesman observed that "the accounts that Smith has solicited capture a child's response to war," and she found the book both "vivid and moving."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Financial Times, November 19, 2005, Martin Gilbert, "A Matter of Survival: Memoirs of the Holocaust Prove There Are Still New Stories to Be Told," p. 34.

New Statesman, September 3, 2007, Lucy Lethbridge, "Growing up in a War," p. 49.

Publishers Weekly, February 20, 2006, review of Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust; A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived, p. 146.

Spectator, October 13, 2007, Philip Ziegler, "And When They Ask Us How Dangerous It Was …," p. 60.

ONLINE

BBC News,http://news.bbc.co.uk/ (November 21, 2005), Richard Allen Greene, "Holocaust Book Yields New Insights."

Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust,http://www.forgottenvoices.co.uk (September 22, 2008).