An Interview with Jack Montgomery
Published: September 30, 2025 • Author: Rob Caldwell
They survived the Holocaust and came to Maine. These are their stories. The new book details the stories of Holocaust survivors in Maine, hoping to combat antisemitism and hatred.
PORTLAND, Maine — More than 30 years ago, Jack Montgomery, a lawyer at a firm in Portland, began working on a personal project that would consume substantial time, money, and energy. His goal was to tell the stories of Holocaust survivors in Maine.
Over the years, people would ask the same question of him time after time, "Are you Jewish?"No, he'd reply, which often led to another question, "I don't get it. Why is a non-Jew so interested in the Holocaust?”
Montgomery's interest in understanding the causes of antisemitism began when he was a boy and deepened as the decades rolled by. The project he started in the 1990s has now come to fruition with the publication of his book, "From the Holocaust to Maine—Testimonies of the Survivors.”
It tells the stories, through Montgomery's photos and the survivors' own words, of 21 people, all of whom were children or teenagers when the Nazis began to carry out what they called the Final Solution. "Some were as young as six," Montgomery said. They had "amazingly horrible experiences to endure. And yet they came [to Maine] to rebuild their lives."