Leap Into Darkness

Young Leo Bretholz survived the Holocaust by escaping from the Nazis - not once, but seven times during his almost seven-year ordeal crisscrossing wartorn Europe. He leaped from trains, outran police, and hid in attics, cellars, anywhere that offered a few more seconds of safety. First Leo swam the flooded 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 labor camp and hid in the Pyrenees, while gendarmes searched the village where he had found a temporary sanctuary. And in the dark hours of one November morning, he escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz. Leap into Darkness is the sweeping memoir of one Jewish boy's survival, and of the family and the world he left behind.