Unforgotten

In this short and gripping memoir Franz Thaler describes his experience of unimaginable suffering at the hands of the Nazis. His father voted to let his family remain Italian citizens and not to become citizens of the German Reich. Franz Thaler, just a young man of nineteen, decided not to serve as a soldier in Hitler's army, and fled to the mountains. When his family was threatened by the Nazis with reprisals, he handed himself in, was arrested, put on trial and sent to the concentration camp in Dachau. When the American soldiers arrived in Dachau at the end of the war, he and some of his surviving inmates were not set free but remained prisoners. They were transported with others to a camp in France and forced to march during the final stage of the journey. There they were at last set free and allowed to return home. Franz Thaler describes all these appalling events with insight, clarity and passion, but also with a quite remarkable humanity and an astonishing lack of bitterness.