A National Jewish Book Awards Finalist
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Twenty years since its first publication, this new anniversary edition of the Holocaust memoir of George Salton (then Lucjan Salzman), gives readers a personal and powerful account of his survival through one of the darkest periods in human history. With heartbreaking and honest reflection, the author shares a gripping first-person narrative of his transformation from a Jewish eleven-year-old boy living happily in Tyczyn, Poland with his brother and parents, to his experiences as a teenage victim of growing persecution, brutality and imprisonment as the Nazis pursued the Final Solution. Alone at age 14, George begins a three-year horror filled odyssey as part of a Daimler-Benz slave labor group that will take him through ten concentration camps in Poland, Germany, and France.
George recalls not only the painful details of his survival, but also the tales of his fellow prisoners, a small group who became more than friends as they shared their meager rations, their fragile strength, and their waning hope. The memoir moves us as we behold the life sustaining powers of friendship among this band of young prisoners.
With gratitude for his courageous liberators, Salton expresses his powerful emotions as he acknowledges his miraculous freedom: “I felt something stir deep within my soul. It was my true self, the one who had stayed deep within and had not forgotten how to love and how to cry, the one who had chosen life and was still standing when the last roll call ended.”
This new and substantially reworked Twentieth Anniversary Edition incorporates research based on recently discovered documents related to George Salton’s concentration camp experience, a new foreword by Michael Berenbaum, a new afterword of George Salton’s unpublished speeches, and an insert with newly discovered documents, photographs and artwork by George Salton of his Holocaust experiences, including his self-portrait on the cover.
