The Survivor of the Holocaust

Anniversary edition hardcover with a new foreword.

A courageous and remarkably accomplished Holocaust survivor’s powerfully vivid account of his transformation from a 13-year-old music student, to smuggling food and arms for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and tenaciously enduring a series of brutal concentration camps, fighting for life against impossible odds.

When Hitler’s Nazis marched into Poland, it brought an abrupt, cruel end to Jack Eisner’s childhood, shattered his loving family, and turned his peaceful Jewish community into a nightmarish world of atrocity and murder. Instead of entering the Warsaw Music Conservatory, to which he’d won a scholarship, Jack found himself climbing cemetery walls, leaping over rooftops, and tunneling through sewers with a gang of fellow teenagers to smuggle food, hope, and survival into his besieged home.

Pulse-pounding and chillingly graphic, Jack’s story takes you into the terror of the Warsaw ghetto . . . to the clandestine meetings with Christian friends who risk their lives to help the teenagers . . . and alongside young rebels as they raise the flag with the Star of David in the final, unforgettable moments of the daring but doomed Warsaw uprising.

From the rubble of the ghetto to the horror of the concentration and slave labor camps, The Survivor of the Holocaust is both a stunning chronicle and a poignant true story of a young man sustained by his passionate desire to be reunited with the girl he loves. It also stands as captivating memorial to the 100 members of a single family who perished, told by one among them who--pitted against overwhelming odds--clung fiercely to their life-affirming message.

Jack Eisner (1925 - 2003) was a Holocaust survivor, educator, author, and accomplished businessman. As a teenager in Poland under Nazi occupation, he smuggled food to Jewish families and fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising before he was imprisoned in a series of concentration camps, including Majdanek, Budzyn, Flossenburg, and Dachau. One of two survivors in a family that lost more than 100 members, he helped the U.S. government track war criminals in the aftermath of WWII and served as a witness at the trial of Nazis at Dachau. He immigrated to New York City in 1949 and went on to build his import-export company, Stafford Industries, into a ＄50-million business, often using the acumen gleaned from his black-market experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. He then spent the last 25 years of his life bearing witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. He founded the Holocaust Survivors Memorial Foundation, established first Institute of Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Center at CUNY, worked with other survivors to found the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Foundation, and created a permanent monument in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery dedicated to the memory of the Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. His bestselling autobiography, The Survivor of the Holocaust, was adapted into a Broadway play as well as a full-length film released in 1985 as ＂War and Love.＂ A leader in promoting Jewish-Christian relations via dialogue, he was the driving force behind the first ever Holocaust Commemoration at the Vatican with Pope John Paul II. He was survived by his wife and three children.