Death March Escape: The Remarkable Story of a Man Who Twice Escaped the Nazi Holocaust

Hersch effectively uses his father’s unusual story to convey the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1945, David Hersch, imprisoned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, managed to escape from his Nazi captors twice. While David had shared some of the details with his son, it was only after his death in 2001 that Jack learned his father had made a return visit in 1997 to the site of his torment. That revelation prompted Jack to undertake his own pilgrimage to Austria, where he sought out key places in his father’s narrative, including the place where David was given refuge by an old woman whose hospitality was followed by betrayal. Jack also visits the home of the non-Jewish Friedmann family, who rescued a starving and exhausted David and hid him until American troops arrived. Jack is able to corroborate key details of his father’s account, narratively balancing his experiences in the present with family members’ recollections of the past. In the process, he comes to understand why he never pushed his father for more information. While that reason won’t surprise many readers, and the psyche of children of survivors has been explored with greater depth elsewhere, this is still a valuable addition to Holocaust literature. (Jan.)