Overview

"I had an uneventful childhood. My family loved me."" The author's direct, personal voice gives this Holocaust memoir its power. Although the writing is direct, almost monosyllabic at times, the book is not intended for young readers. It conveys a brutality that is sudden and close, just as it was for the boy when he heard that his beloved older brother and his father had been shot to death and thrown into a common grave. This is the story of a young boy who came of age before World War II in a small Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian town. Nearly his entire family met their end by gas or by bullet. He survived only by the barest of luck. Among the most moving pages in the book are those the author devotes to the Ukrainian and Polish men and women who found the courage, in the face of savage anti-Semitism raging about them, to come to the aid of the Jewish victims, thus risking death both at the hands of their neighbors and the German masters alike."

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9781138527249

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Reviews

Rarely am I left speechless--but I doubt that I can find the words to describe how deeply moved I was by this Holocaust memoir, a memoir that feels so unlike any other even as it manages somehow to encapsulate them all. What could have been another tale of devastation and desolation is transmuted into an affirmation of the human spirit. --Lawrence H. Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School Hecht's book is a valuable addition to the memoir literature on the Holocaust. He bears eloquent and perceptive witness to the hellish world into which he, his family, and his community had been plunged. The book will serve as an instructive source to lay readers as well as to professional historians. --Daniel J. Goldhagen, professor of history at Harvard's Center for European Studies Rarely am I left speechless--but I doubt that I can find the words to describe how deeply moved I was by this Holocaust memoir, a memoir that feels so unlike any other even as it manages somehow to encapsulate them all. What could have been another tale of devastation and desolation is transmuted into an affirmation of the human spirit. --Lawrence H. Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School Hecht's book is a valuable addition to the memoir literature on the Holocaust. He bears eloquent and perceptive witness to the hellish world into which he, his family, and his community had been plunged. The book will serve as an instructive source to lay readers as well as to professional historians. --Daniel J. Goldhagen, professor of history at Harvard's Center for European Studies Rarely am I left speechless--but I doubt that I can find the words to describe how deeply moved I was by this Holocaust memoir, a memoir that feels so unlike any other even as it manages somehow to encapsulate them all. What could have been another tale of devastation and desolation is transmuted into an affirmation of the human spirit. --Lawrence H. Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School Hecht's book is a valuable addition to the memoir literature on the Holocaust. He bears eloquent and perceptive witness to the hellish world into which he, his family, and his community had been plunged. The book will serve as an instructive source to lay readers as well as to professional historians. --Daniel J. Goldhagen, professor of history at Harvard's Center for European Studies -Rarely am I left speechless--but I doubt that I can find the words to describe how deeply moved I was by this Holocaust memoir, a memoir that feels so unlike any other even as it manages somehow to encapsulate them all. What could have been another tale of devastation and desolation is transmuted into an affirmation of the human spirit.- --Lawrence H. Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School -Hecht's book is a valuable addition to the memoir literature on the Holocaust. He bears eloquent and perceptive witness to the hellish world into which he, his family, and his community had been plunged. The book will serve as an instructive source to lay readers as well as to professional historians.- --Daniel J. Goldhagen, professor of history at Harvard's Center for European Studies

Author Information

Thomas T. Hecht was born in Busk, Poland (now Busk, Ukraine) on November 27, 1929. After the events recounted in this book, he and his mother had many adventures. After their liberation they sojourned in a number of towns, until finally they were admitted to New York in July 1948 under the Displaced Persons program.

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