I Only Wanted to Live

By: Arie Tamir

These are my early childhood memories. Between the ages of 7 to 13 in the 2nd World War I struggled for my life. I was saved from three mass deportations to the death camps, escaped the ghetto, survived several months pretending to be a Polish street child and survived concentration camps.

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Book Description

A broad picture of the Holocaust from the point of view of a child

This book is a memoir of a child who is swept into the whirlwind of the Holocaust. The epic history is narrowed down to the struggle of a single boy nicknamed Leosz to survive the war. From age 7 to age 13, he endures all the horrors that the Holocaust brings upon the Jewish people. Life hangs on split-second timing, decision-making in impossibly cruel circumstances, incredible resourcefulness, luck and the help of others, even Germans.

In the Krakow Ghetto, Leosz is saved from three mass deportations to the death camps. He escapes the ghetto, survives for several weeks pretending to be a

Polish street child, and then goes into hiding. Although sentenced to die after being caught, he is instead miraculously reunited with his family in the Plaszow labor camp. A year later, father and son become slave laborers in the Gozen 2 camp in Austria, where his father perishes. Close to death himself, Leosz is finally liberated by the American army on May 5th, 1945.

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