Roman's journey : a memoir of survival / Roman Halter ; preface by Martin Gilbert

"An unforgettable memoir that has been acclaimed a masterpiece and a work of moral grandeur, Roman's Journey is the mesmerizing true account of one man's impossible misfortune and improbable good luck in surviving the Holocaust. As Sir Martin Gilbert writes in his preface, "The full panoply of evil is here." But there is also a profound and moving lesson of hope." "Roman Halter was a schoolboy in a small town in western Poland when in 1939 he and his family gathered behind the curtains to watch their German neighbors greet the arrival of Hitler's armies with kisses and swastikas. Within days, the family home had been seized, twelve-year-old Roman had become a slave of the local SS chief, and, returning from an errand, he witnessed his Jewish classmates being bayoneted to death by soldiers at the edge of town. So began his remarkable six-year journey through some of the darkest caverns of Nazi Europe - including the Lodz ghetto and the Auschwitz and Stutthof concentration camps - that claimed the lives of every other member of his family and the eight-hundred-strong community of his boyhood. Surviving the firebombing of Dresden, where he was a slave laborer, he managed to escape from an SS death march and lasted out the end of the war in hiding with a brave German couple, only to return to his native village to find it completely transformed."--BOOK JACKET.