In the spring of 1944, Nazi Germany began the last of its major transports of European Jews, the Jews of Hungary, to the complex of labor and extermination camps in southwestern Poland that the Germans called Auschwitz. The Jews were not the only people cast by the Nazis as Lebensunwertes Leben (Life unworthy of Life) and sent to Auschwitz to be used for slave labor and then, one way or another, eliminated; but they were the primary target.
This is a fictional account of one woman's journey from her home in Hungary into that unimaginable nightmare, one which places her in the paths of Josef Mengele and Irma Grese and, over a nine month period of imprisonment in the Birkenau death camp, challenges her ability to not only remain alive and sane but to remain human. Though surrounded by death and faced with the likely loss of her entire family as well as her own life at the hands of her captors, she refuses to collapse into fear and resignation before them; refuses to relinquish her mind and her soul to them; refuses to become like them by returning their hatred with hate. Instead, she tries to understand them, attempts to comprehend how "a civilized people" could produce the monsters that the Nazis have so brutally demonstrated themselves to be.
I met Eta, the real Eta, the woman who is the principal character of this story and my reason for writing it, on a Saturday on the last day of Passover at an ice rink in Seattle, in April of 1988. What followed from our brief two hour conversation, during which she revealed that she had been a prisoner at the infamous Auschwitz death camp, was the beginning of a long journey for me which, eventually, would pull me out of my comfort zone of relative ignorance of world history and into the history of European Jews, the humiliations and violations thrust upon them in their adopted countries for over two millennia, and from there to the ultimate inhumanity that any group of people on our planet has ever been subjected to . . . the attempt, and near success, to annihilate their race, entirely.
With the exception of the handful of incidents which she described to me that day in 1988 that had occurred when she was still a young woman only in her early twenties, this is not Eta's personal story; yet, it is one wholly inspired by her. Since Eta did not write her own story, I have written one for her, because I believe, as countless others have said before me, that the story of Auschwitz needs to be told again, and again . . . in the hope that the world does not forget what happened there, why it happened, how it was possible that it could happen . . . so it does not happen again.
About the Author: The author lives in the Pacific Northwest. This is his first published work. He is currently writing a second novel, a prequel to "Dreams of Auschwitz," as well as editing a collection of short fiction for publication later this year. A third novel is planned to complete the Auschwitz Trilogy.
