"A powerful firsthand account of the atrocities.... Among the top 10 percent of the hundreds of memoirs that I have read". -- Susannah Heschel

On a sunny day in April 1944, the Hungarian gendarmes rounded up all 88 Jews in the small Romanian village of Caraseu and deported them to Auschwitz. Eight returned.

Caraseu is Martin Lax's startling and straightforward account of rural, close-knit life in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and '40s -- and how that life was shattered forever by the Third Reich's genocidal machinery. Herded onto trains to unknown destinations, the nineteen-year-old Lax watched his neighbors, his friends, and his family brutally tortured and executed in a series of camps -- from Auschwitz to Mouthausen, from Gusen to Gunskirchen. Finally liberated, and enduring a perilous three-month journey home on a broken foot, Lax left his world behind and set out for the United States, determined to start a new life -- and committed to remembering the lessons of the past.