I Survived a Secret Nazi Extermination Camp is the harrowing and extraordinary story of the extermination camp at Belzec. Unlike Auschwitz, Belzec is not a name we will all recognise but thousands of Jews perished there. One man - Rudolf Reder - escaped and gave an account of the camp. Mark Forstater has traced it down and it is the centrepiece of his book, a remarkable odyssey into a truly dark death machine, one of the many that the Nazis used as part of the ‘final solution’. Reder’s story is horrifying. The book presents Reder's account of life in Belzec and his miraculous escape. Forstater explains how he found the story and why it is significant to him. The book is an important contribution to Holocaust literature.
Rudolf Reder was the only post-war survivor of Belzec, an infamous and
little known Nazi Death camp where 600,000 Jews were killed in a few
months. The victims died a horrible death in the gas chambers
within two hours of their arrival. Reder managed to survive for four months
as a worker until his remarkable escape. After the war he provided a shocking and horrifying first-hand account of how the SS organised death on an industrial scale. This account of the
Nazi's 'Final Solution' is graphic and sometimes difficult to confront, but
it gives an authentic record of the nightmare that befell the Jews of
Europe.
Mark Forstater provides an introduction to Reder’s account and adds
a personal memoir about his own family, how he learned about the Holocaust
growing up in America, and how in his search for his Grandfather's roots in
Poland he discovered Rudolf Reder’s witness statement, and through it the
fate of his long lost relatives in Poland.