READER'S DIGEST RECOMMENDED READ: Surviving Auschwitz

One teenage boy’s long-lost account of the horrors and occasional glimmers of lights of life in a concentration camp

When 16-year-old Thomas Geve came to London after the war, he brought with him a written account and large collection of drawings detailing his time in Auschwitz. Desperate for the world to know what he’d seen, he approached some publishers, only to be told that “audiences are looking for more cheerful topics nowadays”.

As a result, his account wasn’t published until 1958—and only as a small, pictureless pocketbook. Now, with this fully updated and illustrated edition (coming out just before Holocaust Memorial Day), he finally gets the book he deserves.

Thomas’s father left Berlin for London in 1939, expecting his wife and son to join him. But then Britain declared war on Germany, and they were left stranded as the oppression and eventually the deportation of Jews intensified.

On their arrival in Auschwitz in 1943, Thomas and his mother were immediately separated, with him being sent to the camp’s bricklaying school, overseen by a gruff but not unfriendly block-elder, a fellow inmate. The story that follows is certainly not without its horrors and staggering cruelty both systematic and casual. Yet, at the same time, it’s clearly the testimony of a typical, if unusually bright and curious, teenage boy. Thomas makes some good friends. He does his best to ogle any women he can find. He takes understandable pride in his ability to sometimes outwit the guards (thanks to the updating, we also find out about a later victory: that the bricklaying skills he learned in Auschwitz were later used to help build Israel).

Here, in late 1943, he’s about to receive some astonishing news…