Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel 1931-1943

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 Marions 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 familys 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 Marions 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.