Promises Kept: One Man's Journey Against Incredible Odds

In November 1945, twenty-two year old Ernest W. Michel became a special correspondent for the newly formed German news agency DANA. He reported on the International Nuremberg War Crimes Trial under the byline "Special Correspondent Ernst W. Michel, Auschwitz Survivor 104995."

After spending five and a half years in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, he survived the final forced death march from the Berga concentration camp. Only seven months later, Michel found himself reporting from the Nuremberg trial. In November 2005, he was invited by the German Ministry of Justice to address the Sixtieth Anniversary Commemoration of the opening of the trial. This was not the first occasion where his story has been told-he has repeated this story of survival and hope to audiences all over the United States since first arriving in this country in 1946.

In 1981, Ernest Michel was the initiator and chairman of the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. The event was attended by 6,000 survivors and their families from all over the world; such an event has not been held since. Recently, he returned to his hometown of Mannheim, Germany, to speak at the school from which he was expelled for being a Jew when he was just thirteen.

In Promises Kept, he tells the tale of his miraculous survival during the Holocaust, his experiences as a correspondent at Nuremberg, and his many fascinating experiences since then, as well as discussing the topic of genocide and the importance of preventing such atrocities from occurring in the future.