Boy 30529 A Memoir

"Anyone who survived the exterminations camps must have an untypical story to tell. The typical camp story of the millions ended in death ... We, the few who survived the war and the majority who perished in the camps, did not use and would not have understood terms such as 'holocaust' or 'death march'. These were coined later, by outsiders." Boy 30529 tells the story of a boy who at the age of twelve lost everything: hope, family, and even his own identity. As Nazi persecutions grew in intensity, young Felix's father went to England to obtain travel papers to allow the family to emigrate from Czechoslovakia. But they never made it out of Prague. Felix spent the next three years in a series of concentration camps-Terezin, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Blechhammer, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald-and survived the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. The book is a meditation on memory and of how to forget, and how the Holocaust remains an event at the center of historical debate.

Felix Weinberg was a Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia who settled in Britain after the war. Despite his formal education having been cut short at age twelve, he won a place at university and later become the first professor of Combustion Physics at Imperial College London. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society. He was the author or editor of four books and more than 220 scientific papers. Internationally acknowledged as a leading thinker in his field, he was awarded a D.Sc. by the University of London (1961), both the Silver (1972) and the Bernard Lewis Gold (1980) Medals of the Combustion Institute, Fellowship of the Royal Society (1983), the Royal Society’s Rumford Medal (1988), the D.Sc. Honoris Causa by Technion, Haifa (1990), the Italgas Prize for Energy Sciences (Turin Academy, 1991), and the Smolenski Medal of the Polish Academy of Science (1999), as well as being elected to the American National Academy of Engineering as a Foreign Associate in 2001. The Hugh Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to Combustion Physics was conferred on him in 2005 (Institute of Physics). He died in December 2012.