Into the Tunnel

The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943

Götz Aly

Metropolitan Books

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A generous feat of biographical sleuthing by an acclaimed historian rescues one child victim of the Holocaust from oblivion
 
When the German Remembrance Foundation established a prize to commemorate the million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust, it was deliberately named after a victim about whom nothing was known except her age and the date of her deportation: Marion Samuel, an eleven-year-old girl killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Sixty years after her death, when Götz Aly received the award, he was moved to find out whatever he could about Marion’s short life and restore this child to history.
 
In what is as much a detective story as a historical reconstruction, Aly, praised for his “formidable research skills” (Christopher Browning), traces the Samuel family’s agonizing decline from shop owners to forced laborers to deportees. Against all odds, Aly manages to recover expropriation records, family photographs, and even a trace of Marion’s voice in the premonition she confided to a school friend: “People disappear,” she said, “into the tunnel.”
 
A gripping account of a family caught in the tightening grip of persecution, Into the Tunnel is a powerful reminder that the millions of Nazi victims were also, each one, an individual life.

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Into the Tunnel
Chapter 1Who Was This Marion Samuel?IN 1951, THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHER RUDOLF SCHOTTLAENDER proposed that "the city of Berlin should designate a location where the Jewish children murdered under National Socialism" might be remembered. He noted, though, that such a memorial would be effective only "if it does not swim in the unbounded memory of all the victims of tyranny, the evil that is still happening and may yet happen, but rather is fixed on the zenith of inhumanity revealed in each and every murder of a million Jewish children.

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Reviews

Praise for Into the Tunnel

"Inspired… Aly mines a staggering amount of data to great effect."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A book of unparalleled vividness and power."
—Booklist

"A slim but powerful record… Into the Tunnel pieces fragments of an ordinary life into an extraordinary fabric of remembrance. By restoring one girl's history, Götz Aly helps us bear witness to the unique fate of one innocent consumed by the Holocaust."
—Bookpage

"Aly ingeniously reconstructs the life and death of a German-Jewish girl in this impressive piece of detective work… His account puts a face on the tragedy of the Holocaust."
—Publishers Weekly

"A distinguished and affecting account."
—Kirkus Reviews

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About the Author

Götz Aly

Götz Aly, the author of Hitler’s Beneficiaries and Architects of Annihilation, among other books, is one of the most respected historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. He has been a visiting fellow at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and currently teaches at the Free University of Berlin.

Götz Aly

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Available Formats and Book Details

Into the Tunnel
The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943
Götz Aly

Hardcover

Hardcover
Henry Holt and Co.
Metropolitan Books
January 2008
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780805079272
ISBN10: 0805079270
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 144 pages, Includes one line-art diagram and forty-five halftone images
$20.00
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e-Book Agency
Henry Holt and Co.
Metropolitan Books
January 2008
e-Book Agency
ISBN: 9781429924177
ISBN10: 1429924179
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 144 pages, Includes one line-art diagram and forty-five halftone images
$9.99
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