How do you survive when you’re 11 years old and all your family have been taken from you and killed?
How do you continue to live, when everything around you is designed to ensure certain death?
Arek Hersh tells his story simply and honestly, a moving account of a little boy who made his own luck and survived. He takes us into the tragic world imposed on him that robbed him of his childhood.
The depth of the tragedy, strength of courage and power of survival will move you and inspire you.
Contrary to assertions that the Holocaust years were a mere ‘detail of history’, Arek Hersh gives us a glimpse into the greatest catastrophe that man has ever inflicted on his fellow man.
This book contains 70 remarkable photographs.
Especially for this edition, Arek Hersh has curated an archive of additional photographs from his personal collection:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/articles/zdqkjhv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2tc1LqFH3U
“I loved this book. Even though it doesn’t seem to be professionally written, it engaged me from beginning to end. This is the story of one man’s experience with “the final solution” of Hitler’s concentration camps. Mr. Hersh writes with enough detail that I can hear, see, smell and otherwise get a good sense of what he went through. I would recommend this book to anyone for its inspiration as well as its personal chronicle of this important event that must not be forgotten.” 5★ Amazon review
“A harrowing story of a young boys survival through 5 concentration camps during the Holocaust. He was 11 when hauled off by the Nazis and 16 when the war was over.
It is a miracle he survived. The stories he tells of deprivation, hunger, shootings, beatings, being locked in rail cars for two months, the split second decisions that saved him for another day – these all make for horrifying, true, sad reading for anyone interested in the Holocaust.
One example of his survival … his entire family was rounded up and taken to a local church. He was thirsty and told his mother he was going to run outside to maybe get some water. While he was outside, the Nazis killed every single person in the church. His father, mother, brother, sisters.
5★ Amazon review
“The book was very descriptive and moving, adding more to my cache of info regarding the Holocaust. I will never be able to fathom how anyone survived the horrors and abuse they endured that was relentlessly dealt to them by the violent, murderous, barbaric, merciless, quasi-human beings that Hitler and his cohorts created and used in his attempt to eradicate Jews and others from Europe. There was one incident described by the author that was so horrible that I had to stop reading and re-center myself: An absolute brute of a beast killing a prisoner – another human being – by chopping him up alive with a shovel. I’ve read many, many books about the Holocaust, but this one act of brutality was an unbelievable kick in my gut. What kind of demented mind could allow a human being to do this to another? A Nazi…
Upon being freed, the author and his fellow prisoners showed what decency and humanity truly is: They refused to harm their now-prisoner captors. Because they were human beings…” 5★ Amazon review