Non­fic­tion

Death March Escape: The Remark­able Sto­ry of a Man who Twice Escaped the Nazi Holocaust

  • From the Publisher
May 17, 2013

Death March Escape describes 18 year old Dave Hersch’s year in Mau­thausen Con­cen­tra­tion Camp, his two escapes at the end of the war, and his son Jack’s jour­ney back to Mau­thausen. After a year slav­ing in Mauthausen’s gran­ite mine, as the war neared an end, Dave was put on a death march. Weigh­ing 80 lbs. and suf­fer­ing from tuber­cu­lo­sis, pneu­mo­nia, and typhus, he found the strength to escape, but was quick­ly recap­tured and returned to Mau­thausen. Put on anoth­er death march, he escaped again. This time he was hid­den by a sym­pa­thet­ic local cou­ple until res­cued by Amer­i­can sol­diers. Dave often told Jack his incred­i­ble sto­ry of sur­vival, but Jack’s dis­cov­ery of a pho­to of his father in 2007, years after Dave’s death, com­pels Jack to jour­ney back to Mau­thausen and to the death march routes. As Jack retraces his father’s foot­steps, vis­it­ing the places he slaved and the inter­sec­tions where he escaped, Jack not only learns much more about his father’s remark­able sur­vival than he’d ever known, but he also learns about himself.

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