Jack Klajman is only nine years old when the ghetto walls go up in Warsaw. The Smallest Hope is his powerful memoir recounting how he survived by smuggling food from outside the ghetto, and by hiding in a war-torn city among Nazi soldiers. Witness to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest act of Jewish resistance during World War II, Jack escapes only through a combination of bravery and luck.

Jack (Jankiel) Klajman was born in 1931 in Warsaw, Poland, where he spent the entirety of World War II. After the war, he made his way to England and then to Canada in 1948 through the War Orphans Project, settling in London, Ontario. In 2013, he was featured in the documentary Little Heroes from the Warsaw Ghetto. With his wife, Sonia, he had four children. Jack Klajman passed away in 2019.

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Avinoam J. Patt is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut. His works focus on Jewish responses to the Holocaust, including Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2009) and The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt (2021). Patt co-edited Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020) and Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (2020).

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