The Boy Who Followed his Father into Auschwitz
By Jeremy Dronfield
Blurb
Where there is family, there is hope . . .
Vienna, 1939.
Nazi police seize Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer and his son, Fritz, and send the pair to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in.
When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, his son refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering they endured, there was one constant that kept them alive: the love between father and son.
Based on Gustav's secret diary and meticulous archive research, this book tells their incredible story for the first time - a story of courage and survival unparalleled in the history of the Holocaust.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is a reminder of both the best and the worst of humanity, the strength of family ties, and the power of the human spirit.
Our Review
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is based on a true account. It is essentially a story of the strong bond existing between a son and his father, a bond that cannot be broken even by the horrors of a concentration camp.
The story begins in Vienna and follows Gustav and Fritz along their journey from seeing former friends and neighbours turn against them and denounce them, to being arrested and finally to Auschwitz.
This is far from the first account I have read of Auschwitz and it is somewhat drier than the others, more academic. There are a lot of facts and citations in among the text, but it does little to lessen the impact of the account.
Every time I read one of these stories it strikes me that it is literally unimaginable what they went through. Reading about the horrors and the torment they suffered doesn’t even bring us close to knowing what they went through and books like this are more important than ever before as the number of survivors who are still alive to tell their story dwindles.
A hopeful and harrowing read.
Our Final Rating...
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