Now in his eighties, Sam Pivnik tells for the first time the story of his life, a true tale of survival against the most extraordinary odds.

Sam Pivnik's life story is a classic testimony of Holocaust survival. In 1939, on his thirteenth birthday, Sam Pivnik's life changed forever when the Nazis invaded Poland. He survived the two ghettoes set up in his home town of Bedzin and six months on Auschwitz's notorious Rampkommando where prisoners were either taken away for entry to the camp or gassing. After this harrowing experience he was sent to work at the brutal Furstengrube mining camp. He could have died on the 'Death March' that took him west as the Third Reich collapsed and he was one of only a handful of people who swam to safety when the Royal Air Force sank the prison ship Cap Arcona, in 1945, mistakenly believing it to be carrying fleeing members of the SS. Now in his eighties, Sam Pivnik tells for the first time the story of his life, a true tale of survival against the most extraordinary odds.

"'This vivid memoir'." - Peter Condradi, Sunday Times

"Sixty-seven years after the end of the war, by which point the extent of Hitler's death camps have been fully exposed, we've heard it all before, read the book, seen the movie. Yet we haven't. That's the thing about human stories: each is unique. Sam's is remarkable. Not just the death camps, but his escape from them. And that he could build a life afterwards." - The Big Issue

"'The tale is frank, brutal and horrifying...The fear seems real, and smells real'." - Good Book Guide

"Powerful, absorbing and - tragically - entirely truthful, Hollocaust survivor Sam Pivnik is a remarkable storyteller." - Ham & High

"Frank, brutal and horrifying." - The Good Book Guide