Eight Pieces of silk: What I could not tell my children

Local UH resident, Alex Zelczer, a Holocaust Survivor has recently written a book entitled Eight Pieces of silk: What I could not tell my children. A very brief article about the book and what the author wrote it appears in the Cleveland Magazine.

Today, over sixty years later, Alex can still hear those imploring words reverberating in his head. “As soon as we get through with this, return to Vásárosnamény. Don’t go anywhere else. Let us wait for each other at home,” his distraught father had entreated. Well, … the SS had other plans. Eight Pieces of Silk is the touching memoir of Alex Zelczer, a keen observer and astute reporter of the daily savagery and mayhem of Nazi-controlled Hungary. From the wretched ghetto streets to the ghastly concentration camp barracks, the reader is swept along on a virtual journey to a man made Hell.

Eight Pieces of Silk is a vivid description of the devilish SS brutality, faithfully yet painfully recorded for eternity. Like a lone star against an inky firmament, however, stands Kapo Schteig who dares to shout a Hebrew warning word buried among his German curses, to save the innocents from additional beatings by the Nazis. Eight Pieces of Silk is the culmination of a lifetime of observations, containing the author’s reflections on the years before, during and after the Holocaust, as well as an invaluable repository of physical, statistical and political information. Eight Pieces of Silk….More than just a personal history, this chronicle is also that of countless others who did not survive to tell theirs.