Boy 30529: A Memoir

"Anyone who survived the exterminations camps must have an untypical story to tell. The typical camp story of the millions ended in death ...We, the few who survived the war and the majority who perished in the camps, did not use and would not have understood terms such as 'holocaust' or 'death march'. These were coined later, by outsiders." Boy 30529 tells the story of a boy who at the age of twelve lost everything: hope, family, and even his own identity. As Nazi persecutions grew in intensity, young Felix's father went to England to obtain travel papers to allow the family to emigrate from Czechoslovakia. But they never made it out of Prague. Felix spent the next three years in a series of concentration camps - Terezi n, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Blechhammer, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald - and survived the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. The book is a meditation on memory and of how to forget, and how the Holocaust remains an event at the center of historical debate.