Boy from Buchenwald
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
It was 1945 and Romek Wajsman had just been liberated from Buchenwald, a brutal concentration camp where more than 60,000 people were killed. He was starving, tortured, and had no idea where his family was-let alone if they were alive. Along with 472 other boys, including Elie Wiesel, these teens were dubbed "The Buchenwald Boys." They were angry at the world for their abuse, and turned to violence: stealing, fighting, and struggling for power. Everything changed for Romek and the other boys when Albert Einstein and Rabbi Herschel Schacter brought them to a home for rehabilitation
Romek Wajsman, now Robbie Waisman, humanitarian and Canadian governor general award recipient, shares his remarkable story of transforming pain into resiliency and overcoming incredible loss to find incredible joy.
Finalist for the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children's Non-Fiction
Winner of the 2022 the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of 427 boys transported by a Jewish children's relief agency to France from the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in Weimar, Germany, Polish-Canadian humanitarian Waisman recounts his harrowing youth during and immediately following WWII. Waisman's early childhood in a loving family living in a shtetl in south-central Poland was destroyed by the 1939 Nazi invasion, as he and his family and were moved to a Jewish Quarter in 1941. Forced to become a child laborer in a German munitions factory, Waisman was eventually taken by cattle car to Buchenwald. The primary narrative focuses on his experiences following the 1945 liberation of Buchenwald, but frequently flashes back to the years in the camp as well as to his time working in the factory, watching sick and weak workers being killed, and to memories of his prewar childhood. Frequent shifts in time and place can be confusing, and though his descriptions of his Buchenwald companion Elie Wiesel prove intriguing, the number of significant characters can be difficult to track. But Waisman's resistance to—and eventual acceptance of—help and healing makes for a compelling story of recovery from extreme trauma. Ages 9 –11.
