Miracle: The Boys Who Escaped the Gas Chamber in Auschwitz
Michael Calvin with Naftali Schiff
2026, 233 pages
Undeniable: The Untold Story of the Boys Who Escaped Gas Chamber 5
Jonathan Kalmus
JRoots Films, 2026
A collaboration between a sportswriter, a rabbi specializing in interviewing Holocaust survivors, and Dutch Holocaust researcher Prof. Robert Jan van Pelt has produced both a comprehensive book and an extremely impactful film. Unlike most Holocaust memoirs, Miracle undertakes the challenging task of capturing the spirit and story of not one survivor but a group. Hershel Herskovic, Chaim Schwimmer, Mordechai Eldar, Dugo Leitner, Yaakov Yosef Weiss, and Wolf Greenwald were among fifty-one Hungarian youngsters imprisoned in block 11 of the women’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau and destined for the gas chambers with over a thousand others during the High Holidays of October 1944.
Having watched their companions led to their deaths after selections by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the boys were taken to Gas Chamber 5 on Simhat Torah, October 10. The vents and windows had already been sealed, and the door almost closed, when SS men suddenly chose fifty-one of the condemned to unload potatoes from a newly arrived train. The lads thus became the only victims to survive a gas chamber.
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