Defying Odds

Eli Wiesel, Primo Levi and others have written notably about the horrors of the Holocaust, the loss of life, and the personal costs of cruelty. Ted Lehman adds a uniquely intimate, autobiographical view of that experience with day-by-day accounts of his life. His descriptions of the people and the personal interactions that drove that system are compelling and memorable. He has written for young adult readers because we can never forget.

In Defying Odds Lehman narrates his life as a teen-age Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz and SS slave labor camps. Instead of having a Bar Mitzvah or going to high school, he learned to navigate the maze way of the Nazi death camps. As he clung to life, his family and friends were peeled away from him one by one and sent to the gas chambers.

He shows unerringly how the Nazi demonization of Jews demoralized Jew and non-Jew alike, narrating the inhumanity and barbarism of the German death camps perpetuated by a supposedly "civilized" nation. In this book Lehman describes the loss of moral direction by one of Europe's most powerful countries, it is also a story of hope by a young man who defied that nation's will and won.