Ferien am Waldsee - Erinnerungen eines Überlebenden

The highly acclaimed rediscovery of the poignant text by Holocaust survivor Carl Laszlo. "A great text, a contemporary historical testimony." Alex Rühle, SZ. March 1944. The German Wehrmacht occupies Hungary. As a Jew, the just 20-year-old Carl Laszlo is deported with his entire family from his hometown of Pécs (Fünfkirchen) to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 45 of his family members are murdered immediately upon arrival in the gas chambers. The young man survives an initial selection by Dr. Josef Mengele. But Auschwitz is just the beginning. Until his liberation by advancing Soviet troops in the spring of 1945, Laszlo endures the hell of the Nazi concentration camp extermination machinery in four additional death camps: Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, and Theresienstadt. The fictionalized account of survival, first published in 1955 under the grimly ironic title "Holidays at the Forest Lake" and since unjustly forgotten, is one of the earliest literary testimonies of the Holocaust – and a rare document of the aesthetic processing of the ultimately unspeakable horror.