Life Reclaimed: Rural Transylvania, Nazi Camps, and the American Dream

In April of 1944, during the last year of World War II and two months before the D-day landings at Normandy, Paul N. Frenkel was a fourteen-year-old living happily with his family in the rural Transylvanian town of Hadad, Hungary. Suddenly, without explanation or justification, the family was rounded up with other Hungarian Jews, confined in a factory yard, and then herded into cattle cars and shipped off to Auschwitz.

In Life Reclaimed, Frenkel narrates the story of his life-his prewar idyllic childhood in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, his survival in four Nazi camps as a young teenager, the loss of his parents and most of his relatives in Nazi hell, his daring escape from the death march out of Berga-Elster Camp, and his ultimate success as an entrepreneurial business executive and devoted family man in America.

A story of endurance, courage, and hope, Life Reclaimed represents Frenkel's determined ongoing efforts to come to grips with his Word War II experience-why his family and the other Hungarian Jews failed to realize their dire peril from the Nazis; why their Transylvanian neighbors and friends actively collaborated with the Nazis or passively abandoned their Jewish colleagues to arrest, enslavement, and death; and why this dark past continues to haunt his life and burden his thoughts.

Paul N. Frenkel immigrated to the United States in 1949 and became an American citizen in 1953. He graduated from Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He ran his own company, which built and operated food processing plants for the US military worldwide. Frenkel lives in Connecticut with his wife, Rita. He has two grown children.