Herr Krupp's Berthawerk

Herr Krupp's Berthawerk is a compelling historical novel about the experience of a sixteen-year-old Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz who was sent into the SS slave labor system. This moving story narrates his life as a laborer in Krupp Industries' Berthawerk artillery factory, as he learned to survive constant SS brutality and death threats. He spend his high school years in concentration camps where he learned to cling to life even as the last of his family was sent to the gas chambers; instead of having a Bar Mitzvah and parties, he learned to read and navigate the SS death machine. He learned heroism even before he had a chance to experience life. Theodore Lehman lived that experience, survived the camps, and eventually arrived to the United States where he has lived his adult life. He pushed these near death experiences in the Nazi netherworld to the back of his mind for decades until he received a letter from a German commission inquiring information about the death of prisoners that he might have observed. As Lehman went back into his memories of this time period to tell what he knew, he began to relive the concentration camps and Berthawerk, and he formulated the idea of writing this chronicle of those events.