The boy who survived the death march

The hardships of the Nazi concentration camps as seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy

In 1981 Pavel Taussig wrote a biography for his elder son on his eleventh birthday. That's because he was eleven when he was in Auschwitz. After that, he survived Mauthausen, Melk, Gunskirchen and the death march.

He used only his own notes to describe his experiences. He kept a diary and wrote his experiences from arrest through the concentration camps to liberation as they were fresh in his memory. He did not talk to anyone about them, and spent long periods of time writing in hospitals in Austria, when he was still convinced that neither of his parents had survived the war.

Gradually, Pavel Taussig supplemented the text with notes, documents exhibited in the concentration camps and, shortly after the liberation, with a transcription of the original diary, which he wrote from 4 May 1945 to 27 July 1945.