My Handwriting Saved Me: Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor (PB) (2017)

Albert Halm, Holocaust survivor tells the fascinating story of his family carving out a meager life on the farm in the Carpathian Mountains, in what was then Czechoslovakia, taken away and being interned in three Nazi camps, and ultimately being saved from imminent death by his beautiful handwriting and design skills. He describes how he was able to secret away the true records of Jewish inmate deaths in the Ebensee Camp Hospital. Leaving the horrors of Europe he settles in Australia and commences to catch up on the education he missed out on, eventually entering the field of Diagnostic Radiography. As both a practitioner and a teacher he became renown, and dozens of his research papers are published around the world. He received the Order of Australia Medal for services to medicine in 1983. Using the mantra "We must never forget" he goes on to be the Founding President of the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

"This is a touching account of the author's own life, that of his family and community, and the shattering impact of the Holocaust on everything that existed before the war. He provides a very detailed and personal view of life in a small mountain village in what is now the Ukraine, including how anti-Semitism gradually crept up on them and continued to live on, many years after the war. You really get to know this kind hearted man, through his writing. His account of survival through the concentration camp life is moving and truthful, without being the focus of the whole book. He does not spare the truth of what happened during the Holocaust, but like many who write of those times, urges us to never forget. Albert Halm was a sensitive, observant, loving person, a man of faith and a survivor." --Marika