My first thought from the cover was here is a typical novelist. I could not have been more wrong: “So the unfortunate ones, whom I met daily, kept on living in starvation and hoping for some miracle, little imagining that it could be still worse and the word Hitler was taboo to them.”Mort Laitner absolutely made me feel involved and that I was there with his father at times. After surviving such atrocities, how does one live? “Did my dad know that by telling these stories to these young men he was also saving his own life?” I had become consumed page after page with .so many questions. The story of the Holocaust isn’t new but the accounts of a Jewish doctor who survived became a perspective I didn’t expect to be so captivating.
Many times I felt that I had to put the book down because I became so emotionally invested. His father was taken to one of the most horrific concentration camp named Auschwitz. He not only survived but also helped others to survive as well. I loved the interviews between Laitner and his father’s friends.
Mort Laitner is tenacious, going against his family wishes for his future and eventually carving his own. I have the highest respect for Laitner. My favorite was David’s story about Laitner’ s father. I truly believe this belongs right next to Night: by Elie Wiesel for high school and college students to read.
You will be left captive emotionally, hopeful & hopeless at the same time. I found myself many nights talking to my wife in bed about what Mort Laitner and his father endured.
Philip Mercado
