An astounding memoir about a Jewish teenager forced to become a German soldier
As a young adult in wartime Vienna, Georg Rauch helped his mother hide dozens of Jews from the Nazis behind false walls in their top-floor apartment and arrange for their safe transport out of the country. His family was among the few who worked underground to resist Nazi rule. Then came the day he was shipped out to fight on the Eastern front as part of the German infantry—in spite of his having confessed his own Jewish ancestry. Thus begins the incredible journey of a young man thrust unwillingly into an unjust war, who must use his smarts, skills, and bare-knuckled determination to stay alive in the trenches, avoid starvation and exposure during the brutal Russian winter, survive more than one Soviet labor camp, and travel hundreds of miles to find his way back home.
Georg Rauch (1924–2006) was a professional artist who has exhibited extensively in Europe, the United States, and Mexico. For the last thirty years of his life, he and his wife, Phyllis, made their home overlooking Lake Chapala in the central highlands of Mexico.
Phyllis Rauch, writer, artist, and wife of the late artist Georg Rauch, has lived in Mexico for more than thirty years. Before that she was a branch librarian at the San Clemente Public Library in California. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a masters degree in English and library science.
Robert Fass is the two-time winner of the prestigious Audie Award, numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, and a veteran actor who has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has worked on projects from authors such as Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates, Carlos Fuentes, Jeffrey Deaver, and Lee Child, as well as bestselling and prize-winning nonfiction works in history, politics, health, journalism, philosophy, business, and memoir.