This is another in the recent plethora of first person Holocaust stories being told before the survivors die. It has been 80 years since the war ended, after all. And many of these folks were trapped in the Soviet Bloc for around 50 of those years, so it took a while for their writers to be able to fully access the historical materials of both the East and the West.

These stories are marked as fiction because a human memory can be tricky. Yet there is more firsthand truth in them than in many of the accounts of the Holocaust written by historian outsiders.

This book is the story of Lale, the young Jewish man from Slovakia who is put in charge of doing the tattoos on all the new arrivals at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He falls in love at first sight with Gita, another Slovakian Jew, and they vow they will leave Auschwitz and be wed someday. Three years of harrowing experiences ensue.

The first person look at Auschwitz always shows that people had friends, family, and loved ones there and they usually found ways to stay in touch. They did not just roll rocks around quarries and stand trembling at roll call for three years, as the old movies often portray.

In this case, there is a language warning (usually due to quotes from the Nazi guards) and a warning that this young couple does engage in premarital intimacy, though they did marry the moment they were legally able to do so. And lived a long life together including having a miracle son because Gita’s reproductive system seemed to have been destroyed by the starvation she endured in Auschwitz.

These stories are grim but the determination of the human spirit to survive always speaks to me. God’s Chosen People have endured so much.