Leap into Darkness Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe

A harrowing, action-packed account of the author's series of audacious escapes from the Nazis' Final Solution--"riveting...a fascinating and moving piece of history" (Library Journal). Young Leo Bretholz survived the Holocaust by escaping from the Nazis (and others) not once, but seven times during his almost seven-year ordeal crisscrossing war-torn Europe. He leaped from trains, outran police, and hid in attics, cellars, anywhere that offered a few more seconds of safety. First he swam the River Sauer at the German-Belgian border. Later he climbed the Alps on feet so battered they froze to his socks--only to be turned back at the Swiss border. He crawled out from under the barbed wire of a French holding camp, and hid in a village in the Pyrenees while gendarmes searched it. And in the dark hours of one November morning, he escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz. Leap into Darknessis the sweeping memoir of one Jewish boy's survival, and of the family and the world he left behind.

Leo Bretholz arrived in the United States in 1947 and settled in Baltimore, where he worked in the textile business and then as a bookseller for many years. He continues to lecture extensively about his Holocaust memories. Michael Olesker is a columnist for the <b>Baltimore Sun</b> and a commentator on Baltimore's CBS affiliate, WJZ-TV.