It is hardly an understatement to say that each person who lived through the Holocaust lived through a different holocaust. Consider the story of Jack Weiss, who, at the age of fourteen, was deported from Hungary to the notorious death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Desperate to stay with his father, and barely able to pass as a grown man, he recounts the horror of inspection upon arrival at Auschwitz by a man he remembers as Joseph Mengele. His period in the camps would be shorter than that of many others, but it ended no less dramatically, with a death march westward as Nazi officers forced inmates of the eastern camps to make a retreat before the advancing Russians. Finding himself alone at the end of the war, he travelled through orphanages and refugee camps dotted across Europe until, finally, at the age of seventeen, he was brought by the Canadian Jewish Congress to Winnipeg, Manitoba, to build a new life for himself.

Prompted by his family to preserve his story, Jack Weiss began work on his autobiography. Torn between the desire to forget his Holocaust experience and the need to have his children and grandchildren understand it, Weiss confronted his demons. In the author's own words, “if those who know the truth remain silent, the truth will be lost.”

Jack Weiss' profile page

• Winner, Best Holocaust Memoir, The Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards