About the Book

Alexander Rucki is the child of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and his book is both a reminder of man's breathtaking inhumanity to man and the absolute miracle of survival. These long-term effects are seen in hindsight over sixty years later.

One can only begin to imagine what it would have been like to be sixteen and the sole survivor of a Nazi death camp. It's been done before—Diary of Anne Frank and Schindler's List among the two most popular—but this tragedy is constantly revisited, and I suspect this story is now ripe for the retelling.

Alexander's mother not only survived Auschwitz—her brother, sister, and parents did not—but she married, bore two sons, and moved to a new continent with a new language, far away from the hell of Europe.