"In an unusual but compelling approach to storytelling, When Europe Was a Prison Camp, weaves together two accounts of a family's eventual escape from occupied Europe. One, a fictionalized memoir written by the father in 1941; the other, begun by the son in the 1980s, fills in the story of himself and mother, supplemented by historical research. The result is both personal and provocative, involving as it does issues of history and memory, fiction...

In June 1944, the Nazis locked eighteen-year-old Dave Hersch into a railroad boxcar and shipped him from his hometown of Dej, Hungary, to Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the harshest, cruellest camp in the Reich. After ten months in the granite mines of Mauthausen's nearby sub-camp, Gusen, he weighed less than 80lbs. Somehow surviving the relentless horrors of these two brutal camps, as Allied forces drew near Dave was forced to join a death march...