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 ahead and Zvi would be part of making those dreams into realities.
