You are about to read a very different kind of book. With most books you start on page 1 and continue straight through until the end. In Escape from the Holocaust, you'll proceed differently. Read the first five pages. At the bottom of page 5, you will find instructions telling you to make a choice before going ahead. Each choice leads you to different pages and to different experiences. In fact, you are the real creator of the story because you are the person making the choices.
The careful reader will notice that liberties were taken with exact lapse of
time between certain events. Moreover, not everything in this book happened
in the life of one person. That would be impossible. But all the events are true;
they all occurred in the lives of Jews who lived in Europe during the 1930s and
1940s, during and after those years we call the Holocaust or, in Hebrew, the
Sho'ah.
You may already know that the Nazis (National Socialists) ruled Germany
from 1933–1945. During that time, Adolf Hitler and his armies set out to make
Europe free of Jews (judenrein
) and of such other undesirables
as Gypsies,
the mentally retarded, journalists who wrote against Nazi policies, criminals,
political opponents, Christians who resisted Nazism, and many others. By
killing over 11,000,000 people of whom about 6,000,000 were Jews, of which
1,800,000 were children, the Nazis almost achieved their goal, at least in the
countries they had conquered.
But some European Jews did survive, and this book is about them — how they managed to live through the terror of those times and how they tried to reconstruct their lives. Reading this book may give you a sense of excitement, of adventure, and of triumph — because Jews and Judaism are still alive, despite Hitler's awful effort to rid the world of the Jewish people.