Author Description

This book brings an incredible story about Tomislav Erak, the last surviving Croatian prisoner of Nazi death camps, who is still alive at the age of 97 at the time of the publication of this book. It tells the tale of a man betrayed by Croatian collaborators and arrested by the Italian royal fascist army, quickly convicted for writing anti-Italian slogans on walls, and sent from Koper, Florence, to Perugia to serve his sentence in Italy. After the capitulation of the Kingdom of Italy and the arrival of the Wehrmacht in Italy, he was soon sent to the Nazi death camps Dachau and Buchenwald, where he survived almost two years without serious injuries or illnesses, doing everything necessary to stay alive. Despite all the hardships, including Allied bombings and witnessing death on an industrial scale around him every day, he survived and returned to his hometown of Šibenik in the summer of 1945, after three years of silence about his whereabouts. He survived to share his testimony about the universal evil that plagued the world at that time. The book presents a personal account of a prisoner who never thought he would survive and return to his hometown, his family, and build a life after the war. This is his story...