Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust

This recollection of a youth in the Nazi concentration camps is remarkable for its straightforward reportage. Geve (a pseudonym) was 13 years old when, in 1943, he arrived at Auschwitz. His story begins with the break-up of his family, the departure from Berlin of his father, a well-known Zionist who was among the few to find refuge in England in 1939. Geve, caught up in the liquidation of Berlin's Jewish community, spent a total of 19 months in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Recuperating at Buchenwald after the Allied liberation, he began a series of watercolors of camp life, 16 of which will illustrate this edition. What remains most with the reader, however, is the schoolboy voice reciting, with astonishing equanimity, the conditions he survived. Illustrations not seen by PW. (November)