Stefan Kazikowski

Why Me? is a question that I have asked myself many times. If my father had not survived the day to day hell of the German concentration camps, then neither myself nor my brother would have been here today. We cannot ignore that our upbringing was, in many ways, in the shadow of his life in these camps.

Why Me? is a question that my father and many other prisoners surely thought about. People who, despite everything, pulled through extremely difficult circumstances in which life often hung on a thread.

In the early 90s, my father visited many schools and told the story of his imprisonment and concentration camp experiences. He focused more on describing the camps and how they were organised. In my version, I have chosen to describe more of the brutal incidents he witnessed and the pure luck that saved him and his brother. None of them was of Jewish origin. The warmth and strength of his brother's companionship, together with his never-failing hope, were additional factors that carried him through the daily hardships.

There are many heroic situations where my father succeeded in making life bearable for his fellow prisoners and in so doing, probably saved lives. Although he was reluctant to tell of these incidents during his school visits, I have chosen to highlight them in my book.

Why Me? is a reoccurring thought throughout the text and leads us to delve deeper into the extreme events that even today we can witness. This book is an evidence that there were circumstances that made survival possible, when the conditions and odds showed it would have been impossible.