I Chose Life

During World War II Samuel (Mietek) Gruber was one of the Jews in Europe who actively fought against the Nazi overlords. Serving in the Polish army at the outbreak of the war, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and interned near the Lublin ghetto. With a handful of other Jewish prisoners of war, he organized an escape and took it to the woods, where he helped organize a unit of Jewish partisan fighters.The former town and city dwellers candidly admit that, initially, life as fugitives in the woods held terrors they had not known even in the Nazi prison camp. The screams of small animals in the night, the unearthly shriek that turns out to be only the scraping of a loose branch against a tree trunk, leave them frankly quaking with fear.But within months Gruber and his ragtag band of fellow prisoners, some of them barely past adolescence, mature into a well-disciplined unit of freedom fighters. They engage in daring exploits, including sabotage operations against German military transports and clashes with units of the regular German army. Living with the death every day gives the partisans the courage to attempt the impossible.

Samuel Gruber wrote the book "Synagogues and is co-author of" Survey of Historic Jewish Sites in Poland. He is Rothman Lecturer in Judaic Studies at Syracuse University, research director of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, and is president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments.
Paul Rocheleau has photographed books on Frank Lloyd Wright, H.H. Richardson, and Frederick Law Olmsted.