<DIV><B>By the beloved former director of the Jerusalem International Book Fair, this moving memoir follows the author's life from his Lithuanian childhood to the death camps in Dachau, and his years after the liberation, helping to build the State of Israel.</B><BR><BR>Persuaded by a legion of adoring international book editors and publishers around the world to write his account of the Holocaust, Zev Birger describes in this riveting, ultimately uplifting story how his idyllic childhood in a Zionist family in Kovno, Lithuania, was destroyed—first by the Soviet invasion in 1940, then by the German occupation—and his subsequent deportation to the ghetto. In powerful, simple prose, he portrays his family's efforts to survive there, which ended in their discovery by the SS in a cellar hideaway as gunfire sounded from the approaching front.<br><BR>His family was separated and deported to the Dachau concentration camp, where Birger was forced into heavy labor in an underground arms factory. The only survivor in his family, he was brought to an American-run army hospital after the liberation, where he was so emaciated he was given up for dead. He rallied against all odds and went on to help Jews establish themselves in Israel, where he played an active role in the construction of the Israeli state, especially in building the book publishing and film production industries within the country, and bringing them recognition throughout the world.<br><BR>Originally published in Germany in 1997 by Luchterhand jointly with eight other German publishers, this is the first English-language edition.</DIV>