From Victim to Soldier: My Journey from Auschwitz to Israel

by Zvi, Danny Rittman

Overview

Herman Rittman was born in 1930 and grew up Hungary, enjoying the simple liberties of going to school and playing with friends, even in the early years of World War II. But in 1944, the Third Reich began deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, and Herman and his family were sent there, most of them immediately put to death. For Herman Rittman, this would be only the beginning of his journey. In From Victim to Solider: My Journey from Auschwitz to Israel, a retired Israeli colonel and intelligence officer recounts his life from boyhood in Hungary to his retirement in Israel. Herman Rittman, later adopting the name Zvi in his new country of Israel, was interned in a Hungarian ghetto before being sent to Auschwitz, where after enduring months of hard labor he would be paradoxically saved from execution by the war criminal Josef Mengeleonly to be selected as a victim for the Angel of Deaths medical experiments. But after his liberation by American troops at Dachau, Zvi would go on to see the birth of the state of Israel and commit his life to fighting for its future. From Victim to Solider has many powerful and poignant moments, as any work on the Holocaust, war, and espionage would. Though many passages display Zvis dark humor, which has been with him since Auschwitz and indeed helped him through that ordeal and many more, there would be better days aheadand Zvi would be part of making those dreams into realities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781532038327
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/26/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Herman (Zvi) Rittman survived the Holocaust and afterward returned to Romania, making his way to Palestine shortly before the birth of Israel. He then served in a militia that defended his kibbutz, later joining the Haganah and the Israel Defense Forces. He served in the War of Independence, the 1956 Sinai War, the Six-Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, where he was badly wounded, and Zvi eventually entered a civilian intelligence service known as Shin Bet, where he ran an espionage network in Lebanon and Syria. Today Zvi is enjoying his retirement along the Mediterranean Sea. Danny Rittman is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, and he designs semiconductors with both civilian and military uses. He helped design chips for DEC, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm, and he has worked on sophisticated custom chips used by air defense systems. He shares his fathers compelling biography in From Victim to Soldier: My Journey from Auschwitz to Israel.