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Spectacular. My heart pounded through parts of it. Recommend! ( )

There are really no single words to describe what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust. It’s horrific, abhorrent, heinous, appalling...the list goes on and on. This book brings to life all those events that none of us can even begin to imagine, yet we should imagine it, and it should affect us to our core.

Joel Rosenberg does an excellent job writing this novel (even though it’s a work of fiction, it also has the truth intertwined in the story) and the reader can just begin to understand the terror and horror of what happened. The heroic people who did what they could to help rescue as many Jews as possible and the heroic Jews who would not give up. This story must be read. It must be absorbed. It must be remembered.

The characters are so real, the events so heart-wrenching, that you will find yourself both wanting to keep reading and yet needing to put it down for a while to take a breath. This is a gut-wrenching story of the horrors man can do to each other, yet at the same time it’s a beautiful story of the love that blossomed to care for each other. ( )

Joel Rosenberg isn't that great of an author, and this book illustrates that very well. The narration is dry and there are a number of time skips that appear to be there just so Rosenberg doesn't have to write more of the story. The characters weren't very well defined, and the only one I really liked was Luc, which is why it was such a shame when he died . This book honestly reads like Rosenberg read Anne Frank's diary, The Hiding Place, and a few other books about the Second World War, and then tried to cobble together a book about it.

It wasn't THAT awful, but it was bland and boring enough that I wouldn't ever recommend it. ( )

Less than 150 people escaped from Auschwitz. Rosenberg has meticulously researched the facts about those escapes and used the one by Rudolf Vrba, hiding in a pile of wood outside of the electrified fences and waiting for searches to end after three days, as the method for the protagonist, Jacob Weisz, to get free along with a Christian pastor (Jean-Luc LeClerc), who helped Jewish refugees fleeing Vichy France. Their mission was timed to warn of the plans to eliminate all of the Hungarian Jews at Birkenau. Great characters, believable descriptions of the horror of the Nazi death camps, and a story of hope for mankind. Read it, not a dull moment throughout, you will not be disappointed.
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