At the age of 14, Wolfgang (Sinai) Adler was already an expert on the subject of man's inhumanity to man. But four years of living under the increasingly oppressive Nazi regime in occupied Prague and fifteen months in Theresienstadt could not prepare him for the Hell-on-Earth that was Auschwitz. "Selected" for slave labor, he went on to Mauthausen, where the conditions were abominable and survival unlikely. It was there that the young teenager who had witnessed such atrocities and experienced such brutality made a solemn oath to the Almighty. He vowed that if he indeed survived the war, he would dedicate his life to learning and teaching the Holy Torah and observing G-d's commandments. As the war drew to a close, the Nazi beasts saw their imminent defeat looming on the horizon, but their thirst for blood was not yet slaked. They drove their half-dead prisoners to a forest outside Gunskirchen, Austria, a forced-march of 60 miles, where death by starvation awaited them. The American troops that liberated Gunskirchen could barely distinguish between the emaciated, lifeless inmates and the hundreds of corpses they found strewn on the forest floor. After gaining his freedom, the author faithfully recorded his experiences, while the terrible memories were still fresh in his mind. His rendering of the concentration camp layout, so precisely drawn in this journal, is a virtual blueprint testifying to the meticulousness with which the Nazis designed their genocide facilities. This task completed, he set out to fulfill the promise he had made in Mauthausen. More than a Holocaust memoir, this volume contains Rabbi Adler's personal analysis of the tragedy that befell the Jewish people. His inspiring insights shed light on the meaning of this terrible era of suffering and serve to strengthen our faith in the Almighty.
by Sinai Adler
Translated by Tzvi Barish