FROM BROKEN GLASS

Sub-titled 'My Story of Finding Hope In Hitler's Death Camps To Inspire A New Generation', this Nazi concentration camp survivor has gone on to be the founder of the New England Holocaust Memorial. It is a wise and intimate memoir about finding strength in the face of despair. On October 29th 1939, Szmulek Rosental's life changed forever when the Nazis marched into his home town of Lodz, Poland, destroyed the synagogues, urinated on the Torah, and burned the beards of the rabbis. Two people were killed that first day in the pillaging of the Jewish enclave, but much worse was to come. Szmulek's family escaped that night, but soon all of the family would perish except the eight year old Szmulek who managed to survive against all the odds. Through his resourcefulness, determination and most importantly the help of his fellow prisoners, Szmulek lived through some of the most horrific death camps of the Holocaust including Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and seven others. He endured acts of violence and hate, but never before talked about it in its literature. He was repeatedly raped by Nazi guards and watched his family and friends die, but those experiences only hardened the resolve to survive the genocide and use the experience and insights into morality and human nature to inspire people to stand up to hate and fight for freedom and justice. On the day he was scheduled to be executed, he was liberated by American soldiers and eventually travelled to Boston Massachusetts where, with all of his friends and family dead, he made a new life for himself, taking the name Steve Ross. He can now look back on a career of 40 years as a psychologist working in the Boston City Schools helping to forge a more compassionate world. 266pp in fairly large print with eight pages of photographs including the Nazi propaganda image he was selected for.