One Bridge To Life (3) - Softcover

Samelson, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0945938020 ISBN 13: 9780945938026

Publisher: William Samelson, 2017

In the years since the brutality of Nazi-occupied Poland, William Samelson, a survivor, has made peace with his past. His riveting autobiographical novel is an emphatic celebration of life. The year is 1939. The boy is ten-years-old Wilek Samelson. As the Nazis tighten their grip on Poland, young Wilek’s beloved home and way of life begin to unravel. Through the next harrowing years of war, labor camps and incalculable personal loss, boy quickly becomes man. Wilek manages to escape the Nazis, courageously participating in the partisan underground activity. Relentlessly hunted down and recaptured by the SS, he survives the final years of war in the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, until liberation in 1945.

From this suspenseful and emotion-charged portrait of a world gone mad, emerges Samelson’s unique perspective on the unspeakable. In place of unseeing bitterness and hatred, Samelson affirms the difference between the Nazis who persecuted his family and people, and those Germans who were caught between the mission of Hitler and their own humanity. Electrifying instances of heroism and cruelty abound. We instinctively know this story is not only true, but true to human nature.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Dr. William Samelson was born in Poland. At the age of eleven, he was interned in various Nazi ghettoes and slave labor-death camps for six-and-a-half years. Liberated on 1May 1945 by the U.S. Army, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1948. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and he taught in various Universities and Colleges throughout the U.S. and abroad. He has written extensively on the Holocaust and lectured widely on a variety of topics relating to it.

From Library Journal:

This fictionalized memoir of a young Jewish boy's harrowing experiences surviving the Holocaust in Poland is a testament to the individual's will to survive. Vilek Samelson sees his family disappear one by one. His grandfather, whose faith in God has been of great support to the boy, is shot. His grandmother is burned in the synagogue. His mother and sister are transported to Treblinka, while he and his brother survive forced labor, life with the partisans, and finally a series of concentration camps. Vilek's story is one that must continually be retold. However, the author, himself a survivor of Buchenwald, would have been better served by telling the story of his life as fact , since fictionalizing it trivializes it, and the format lacks the tension of a genuine novel. Purchase where appropriate.
- Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.