Out on a Ledge: Enduring the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Beyond (2nd edition)

Out on a Lege is an intimate portrait of a brave Jewish girl coming of age. When Hitler's storm troopers poured into Lodz, Poland in September 1939, they quickly launched a reign of terror that fulfilled the Fuehrer's greatest fantasies. Going far beyond Kristallnacht in Germany the year before, the Nazis savagely beat and murdered the Jews, evicted them from their homes, and herded them into the first ghetto of modern times, in effect a giant prison racked by hunger, disease, and forced labor. A Jewish administrator, Chaim Rumkowski, was put in charge of Lodz's 175,000 Jews and made to do the Germans' bidding. He would be forced to round up 20,000 in a single week -- the elderly, the ill, and even the ghetto's children -- and deport them to a death camp on sealed trains with neither food or water. Against this backdrop of horror and humiliation, the Chasidic teenager Chava Gerszt (later Eva Libitzky), outwitted the Nazis as she ingratiated herself with German soldiers, managed to rescue her parents, and found desperately needed food on the black market. In the end, she survived Auschwitz and a slave labor camp before being liberated in Theresienstadt in the midst of a typhus epidemic. The story of resilience sheds new light not only on the sacrifices and survival of Lodz Jews, but on the Jewish experience throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Her dramatic postwar struggles in America -- in the city, suburbs, and on the farm -- are no less revealing. Lehrhaus is proud to publish the second edition, which includes Eva’s eventful return to Poland in 2013 with 16 of her closest relatives spanning three generations., ISBN13:9780996088602 ISBN10:0996088601 Material Type:paperback