An astounding memoir about a Jewish teenager forced to become a German soldier.
As a teenager in wartime Vienna, Georg Rauch helped his family hide dozens of Jews behind false walls in their top-floor apartment and arrange for their safe transport out of Nazi-occupied Austria. Nonetheless, in 1943 he was drafted into Hitler's army, soon to be shipped out to fight on the eastern front as a radio operator with the German infantry--in spite of his having confessed his own Jewish ancestry. Thus begins the incredible journey of a young man thrust into a war that was already lost, fighting for a cause in which he never believed.
In this transfixing first-person account enriched with his own wartime drawings and photographs, Rauch tells the story of how he stayed alive in the trenches, avoided starvation and exposure during the brutal Russian winter, and survived Soviet labor camps.
