Rosenberg, Yaakov ben Gershon,
Originally published: Blackheath, N.S.W., Australia : Brandl & Schlesinger, c2005.

Jacob G. Rosenberg was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest member of a working-class family. After the Germans occupied Poland he was confined, with his parents, his two sisters and their little girls, to the hermetically sealed Lodz Ghetto, from which they were eventually transported to Auschwitz. With the exception of one sister (who committed suicide a few days later) all the members of his family were gassed on the day of their arrival. He remained in Auschwitz for about two months, then spent the rest of the war in other concentration camps.

This book is a rendezvous of history and imagination and dreams and of hopes and disenchantments. It unfolds in a succession of reminiscences that weave together a shimmering tapestry depicting a lost world. The setting is Lodz, Poland, in the years between the author's childhood and early maturity, a period overtaken by the cataclysmic events of the 1930s and early 1940s. The narrative approach presents a powerful personal testament and reflects the determination of an entire community to remain human in the face of its greatest peril, even at the last frontier of life.