Herbert Scherer’s Early Life and War Experience

Herbert Scherer was only nine years old when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. World War II was declared in 1939. In 1942, he was drafted into the army, after which he was shipped to the Eastern front as an infantry soldier. Following his capture a year and a half later, he spent four and a half years in the death camps of Siberia. Herbert survived. Millions of others did not.

Writing in the simple, uncluttered fashion of a soldier's diary, Scherer describes the death camps of Siberia, and how their captives clung to life. Dwelling on those years, he finally took pen in hand in a cathartic quest to empty past traumas onto clean white sheets of paper, thus consigning them to the past, revisited.

Scherer’s Reflection and Survival

My story is about what I experienced, and the fact that I attribute my survival to a higher power. I drew upon that higher power to sustain me when there was really no hope; no rescue possible.