The Fighter

by Jean Jacques Greif

Overview

Moshe Wisniak grew up malnourished and fatherless outside Warsaw at a time when Jews and Poles lived in poverty and violence. When Moshe's brothers emigrate to Paris in the 1930s, it means a new life for the whole family, who follow soon after. A decent job, a lovely young wife, and a hobby as an amateur boxer vastly improve Moshe's prospects until the day he is rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. There he is tortured, starved, and most shockingly, asked to entertain Nazi soldiers by boxing against dying prisoners.

Moshe wants to survive without killing his comrades, but how? Based on the memoir of his family friend, Jean-Jacques Greif has taken the facts and turned them into a gripping novel about life and death in Auschwitz.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619630734
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Jean-Jacques Greif lives in Paris, where he works as a journalist for the magazine, Marie Claire. About writing The Fighter, he says, "I was born in Paris in 1944. My parents and their friends spoke French with a strong Polish accent. Some of them (including my father) had blue numbers tattooed on their arms. All they ever talked about in their faulty French was the war. How boring! But then, much later, when they had white hair and plastic knees and I met them at funerals, I thought their old heads were probably filled with great stories. I had become a journalist and writer. I started interviewing them. Five of my twenty published novels are based on what my parents and their friends told me. This is one of them." Learn more about Jean-Jacques Greif on his bilingual web site www.jjgreif.com.
Jean-Jacques Greif lives in Paris, where he works as a journalist for the magazine, Marie Claire. About writing The Fighter, he says, "I was born in Paris in 1944. My parents and their friends spoke French with a strong Polish accent. Some of them (including my father) had blue numbers tattooed on their arms. All they ever talked about in their faulty French was the war. How boring! But then, much later, when they had white hair and plastic knees and I met them at funerals, I thought their old heads were probably filled with great stories. I had become a journalist and writer. I started interviewing them. Five of my twenty published novels are based on what my parents and their friends told me. This is one of them." Learn more about Jean-Jacques Greif on his bilingual web site www.jjgreif.com.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 9 Up-Following his emigration from Warsaw to Paris in 1929, at age 14, Moshe adopts the French name Maurice. Within six years, he establishes a new life with a job, wife, and child in a city displaying less anti-Semitism than the city of his childhood. But his world is about to change again when the Nazis overtake Paris and he is deported, first to a work camp and then to Auschwitz. Moshe draws strength and emotional perseverance from his amateur-boxing hobby, using his skills and techniques to outsmart or even withstand the brutal beatings and long hours of hard labor with minimal nourishment. Told in first person, this novel is a day-by-day account, with graphically detailed descriptions of the cruelty and inhumanity created in a prison/slave environment with its own hierarchy pitting stronger Jews and other prisoners against weaker ones and overseen by merciless German commandos. Ultimately, the adage of "survival of the fittest" is clearly displayed here as Moshe's story, based on a real survivor's experience, is delineated, ironically negating Hitler's Final Solution. In the end, however, Greif reminds readers that one not only needed emotional and physical strength but also a whole lot of luck and cleverness to be able to resist and emerge from the torturous nightmare of the camps. Tough, realistic reading with some raw language.-Rita Soltan, Youth Services Consultant, West Bloomfield, MI Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

In May of 1945, Moshe Wisniak is traveling to Paris by train, exactly 16 years after he first moved there from Poland. Now he's a survivor of Auschwitz, and when he finds his family, his son is afraid of him. He looks like a vampire: gray skin, eyes popping out of his skull, shaved head. But he's a fighter. Greif based the novel on the experiences of his father's friend-not just a witness, but a Jewish hero. Moshe learned to box in Paris, and a central scene of the story is his moral dilemma when commanded to fight a dying prisoner: He must kill the opponent or be killed by the SS if he refuses. But he knows he doesn't want to return home and have his son know his father is a murderer. It's a spirit that will resonate with readers, though the final lines of the afterword are important: "To survive in Auschwitz, being strong and knowing how to fight did not suffice. You needed lots of luck." (Fiction. 12+)

Kirkus Reviews