WATCHMAKERS: A Story of Brotherhood, Survival, and Hope

A powerful Second World War story of three brothers and their sense of hope during the Holocaust, the book reads like a thriller. Harry Lenga was born in 1919 to a family of Chassidic Jews in Kozhnitz, Poland, and this true story narrated by him from his early life takes him through the ghettos, labour and death camps and early stages of 'liberation' where he and his brothers survived against the odds by a combination of luck, tremendous ingenuity, inner strength and belief, and because they could fix watches, a skill they had learned from their father, their lives were saved. Upon the German invasion of Poland, the Lenga family was upended and Harry and his brothers Mailekh and Moishe lived under the most devastating conditions imaginable, with death always imminent. They fixed watches for the Germans in the ghettos and the brutal slave labour camps of occupied Poland and Austria, from Wolanow and Starachowice to Auschwitz and Ebensee. The brothers endured, bartered, worked, prayed and lived to see liberation. In the retelling of their story there is little complaint or self-pity, and Harry's heartening story is an account of his childhood, the lessons learned from his own father, his harrowing tribulations, and the inspiring life before, during and after the war in a singular and vital story. It is a profoundly moving tribute to fortitude, resilience, brotherly love and faith. 'I really came to appreciate the life and death significance of having something as simple as a pair of shoes, a battered metal soup bowl, or a shave,' - Simon Scarrow. "So as a joke about the ARBEIT MACHT SREI ('Work Makes You Free') sign on the gate of the Auschwitz 1 camp. We would point to the smoke and the fire coming up from the crematoriums and say, 'Probably tomorrow that will be our ticket to freedom.'" 324pp, many photos.