Publisher's Synopsis
A tragicomic, inspirational memoir of surviving the Holocaust we seldom hear about. The author spent nearly three years on the road with the Hungarian forced labor battalions during WWII, taking him from Budapest to the area of Stalingrad. Armed with only his wits, a smattering of courage, some unexpected help and lots of luck, he survives the brutal conditions with his joie de vivre and sense of humor intact. During this time, his tasks included all the common work assigned to forced laborers: road repair, building defensive fortifications, supplying tanks with fuel, clearing mine-fields, as well as the common military folly of moving piles of dirt from one side of the road to the other. To this were added the roles of tailor, office clerk, official counterfeiter and general observer of human stupidity which led to many amusing anecdotes. Because so few of those taken into the Hungarian forced labor battalions survived the war, there are many details of their daily life wandering around the Eastern Front that have not been documented elsewhere. There are also glimpses of the author's day to day life as a young man in pre-war Budapest.
