The deeply moving true account of a young Jewish woman's imprisonment by the Nazis at the Auschwitz death camp. On May 29, 1944, the day after Isabella Katz's twenty-third birthday, she, her family, and all the Jews in the ghetto in Kisvárda, Hungary, were rounded up by Nazi storm troopers, packed into cattle cars, and deported to Auschwitz. There, Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, scrutinized the family and decided who would live-for a time-and who would die. Isabella and three of her sisters waged a daily battle to survive, giving one another strength, courage, and love, promising themselves that they would cheat the crematoriums and end each day alive. Thirty years after she escaped from the Nazis, Isabella wrote this powerful and luminous memoir. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a celebration of the strength of the human spirit as it passes through fire," Fragments of Isabella has become a classic of holocaust literature and human survival.
"Luminous and moving work . . . An invaluable addition to the literature of history's most terrible tragedy . . . A voice not of defeat, but of affirmation."
Gerald Green, author of Holocaust
"Soul. That is what this book stands for. Soul. Dostoevsky would have approved of it."
Henry Miller
"Profoundly moving . . . Leitner writes with a searing sensitivity that can move one to tears."
