Helpful Score: 2
The voice you follow through this extraordinary text will haunt you forever. I can't see a fourteen or fifteen year old boy without thinking what happened in this book. The Nobel Prize was well deserved for this miraculous achievement.
Very straight forward account of a young Hungarian Jew being incarcerated in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Zietz concentration camps during the holocaust. At first, on the streets of Budapest, he is sent to work in an oil refinery and his father has been sent to a labor camp. Then one day, the bus he takes to work is stopped and all the young men who work at the refinery are detained and sent to Auschwitz. At first, he doesn't understand what is happening when he sees the "prisoners" at the camp until he too is made a prisoner and is forced to give up his possessions and wear the striped prison garb. He eventually finds out what is happening with the gas chambers and crematoriums but he just moves from one day to the next without wondering too much about what is happening. He eventually gets sent to Buchenwald and Zietz and winds up in the hospital at Buchenwald. His experiences are horrific but he takes it all in stride and is finally liberated by the Americans. When he returns home, he finds his family is gone (his father died in the labor camp) and his aunt and uncle cannot comprehend what he has been through. I would recommend this one as a good example of holocaust literature from a slightly different perspective.
