Lendle

INDRODUCTION:
PLEASE NOTE: A PAPERBACK OF THE 8TH EDITION IS AVAILABLE at Amazon.com.
The book starts with My Dream for Ever:
I wake up early in the morning. I am in our home in Terezin Concentration Camp. It is a dark rainy day, 1944. There are some 20 double bank-beds in a huge barracks room. I see a little group of children in the shadows. They are just getting ready to leave. They are trying not to wake up the other children: “Hey Kids, kids; where are you going to? Wait, wait for me.”
“We are leaving on a transport to the East. We are leaving to the place of No Return. You will never see us again. You stay back and remember us. And you tell all the people about us. No matter if they like us or not.”
“Yes I will, I will, I promise.”
They almost made it; the remaining rest of us were scared: who is going to be selected to go next time?
I hope you will find my book to be educational and enjoyable. It is not only about Holocaust, Terezin and the vanishing children. The story goes beyond the WWII.
This 7th Edition includes also a recent ARIAL PHOTO OF TEREZIN: about 70 years after the time when Terezin was a holding tank; a waiting prison for those little innocent children sentenced to death, just because of their race.
My book is about 6 to 9 years old Tommy: locked up with other children like him for three years in a concentration camp prison. They all were sentenced to death. They all were supposed to be murdered. The murderers ran out of time and lucky Tommy survived with not too many others like him. Tommy, the little boy was me. I have changed with the time. You will change also.
I will tell you in my book what I remember from those terrible days. It is my own experienced. I was 3 years old when the Nazis invaded my world and I was 9 years old when the war ended. I was freed from the cage. Another cage started soon after and it lasted much longer.
The story introduces our family and the environment we were living in. The family history goes back to the year of 1765 and to a little village Schwanenbruckel, located at southern border of Bohemia, next to Germany. Bohemia became Czechoslovakia after WWI; it is Czech Republic now. Schwanenbruckel was the family get-together place for many years; our family consisted of different Jewish people, some were rich and some were not so wealthy, but they all were certainly resourceful in ideas. It was a close knit family, loving and hard working friendly people. They appreciated the fact that they were living in Czechoslovakia, a country which was a democratic island in not too democratic Europe. This was before the Second World War. They saw the thread of Nazi Germany to the Jewish population. Some of them escaped, most of them vanished, swallowed by the Nazi murdering machine.
The story is about our family life in Pilsen where I was borne. My father escaped to Prague on the day when the Nazis occupied the country we lived in; my mother and I followed two weeks later. We settled in a wooded area, east of Prague and we lived there for three years.
Then came the trip to Terezin concentration camp, to the prison. The live there follows. The story does not end with Terezin liberation. You will see that there was actually never a complete liberation at all. There was a temporally lift of the cage we lived in, just to have the cage come down, always more and more forcefully. Until we escaped from Czechoslovakia and from Europe and we settled in Australia, and finally we made it to USA. The story ends back in a freed country.
One last note: I talk about my own experiences only when I talk at the schools. However; in my writing I included family members and friends experiences also. And, I am not supposed to insert any jokes into my presentations; Holocaust was a very sad story by itself. But telling jokes was an efficient survival effort in the concentration camp; so I included some relevant Jewish jokes in the book also.