cover image Survivor: Auschwitz, the Death March and My Fight for Freedom

Survivor: Auschwitz, the Death March and My Fight for Freedom

Sam Pivnik. St. Martin’s, $26.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-02952-2

An 86-year-old Jewish survivor of ghettos, concentration camps, and the infamous January 1945 Death March, Pivnik graphically describes the casual and systematic brutality he witnessed as a forced guard at Auschwitz—on the ramp where incoming prisoners were processed, he routinely watched as Josef Mengele (“the Angel of Death”), with “casual flicks of his doeskin gloves,” decided whether prisoners were destined for slave labor or death. Pivnik’s grim will to survive impelled him to make numerous moral concessions, but he makes no excuses for his actions: “I became... a human vulture.” When a bracelet he’s stolen is found by a guard, he refuses to fess up, despite the possibility that someone else might take the fall for it: “This was Auschwitz-Birkenau; the rules were different. And you never put your hand up for anything.” Shuttled to and fro as “the Reich [bled] to death,” Pivnik was aboard the doomed Cap Arcona, a ship full of prisoners, when it was sunk in the Bay of Lübeck by the British Royal Air Force just days before Germany’s surrender. Amazingly, he swam to shore and lived. The horrors recounted here will be familiar to most readers of Holocaust memoirs, but they are no less shocking for that. 8-page b&w photo insert. Agent: Andrew Lownie, the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency (U.K.). (June 18)