Survivor's Game

A heart-wrenching true story of one young man's journey into, through, and out of the Holocaust.

Some people have a knack for survival, for getting out of jams. Twelve-year-old David Karmi found himself face to face with the ultimate test. With his homeland consumed by fear, David entered a world of human slaughter. Whole towns were vaporized. Cities obliterated in firestorms. More than fifty million people died—twelve million either gassed, shot, hanged, worked to death or subjected to biological experiments. David survived.

Separated from his parents and siblings, David Karmi was hurled into a nightmare of death camps, forced marches, sickness, violence and depravity. On his own, through the tortuous months that followed, he endured. He is a survivor of Auschwitz, Dachau, and the Warsaw Ghetto. He enured forced marches, starvation, and even persecution after the Allies freed him from the camps. This is a story of strength, courage, some luck - and an amazing man, told in his own words. It is the biography of a survivor.

Praise for Survivor's Game:

“[Karmi’s debut forgoes] the despair employed by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, instead echoing the optimism of Anne Frank…Eminently readable and largely remarkable.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"‘Some people have a knack for survival, for getting out of jams.’ Karmi is one of those, and he faces the ultimate test as a young teen in Nazi-occupied Europe as he and his family are deported to Auschwitz."
—Publishers Weekly

"Survivor’s Game reads not so much like a memoir but a novel, replete with tension, drama, and twists and turns. Recommended."
—Midwest Book Review

"This is a story we all need to know…the cost of forgetting is too high."
—New York Times best-selling author Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff