Survivor

Sam Pivnik lived through more close calls than most people could imagine, escaping death on fourteen separate occasions. His life changed on his thirteenth birthday, the day German forces moved into Poland. He then endured two ghettos and roughly half a year on the Rampkommando at Auschwitz, a unit where incoming prisoners were sorted into those sent into the camp and those sent to the gas chambers. Later he was assigned to the harsh Furstengrube mine camp. When the Third Reich was falling apart, he was one of only a few men who reached safety by swimming after a British air force attack sank the ship that was carrying him as a prisoner.

After the war he settled in London, but he discovered that people there were absorbed in their own wartime ordeals on the Home Front and had little interest in what he had been through. Now in his eighties, Pivnik finally sets down his account in full for the first time.