"German, Jew, Muslim, Gay offers an astonishing perspective on the history of modern Germany through the vantage point of a man with multiple identities who devoted his life to religious utopias, fought for homosexual rights, wrote gay fiction, converted from Judaism to Islam (one of the few of any faith to do so), and considered himself part of a spiritual elite that held the key to Germany's salvation. Born in Posen in 1880, the son of a Jewish industrialist, Hugo Marcus converted to Islam and chose the name Hamid; he became the most important convert in Germany while retaining his membership in the Jewish community. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, where he was in the unique position of Muslim witness to the Holocaust. The imam of his mosque gained his release and he escaped to Switzerland, where he wrote gay fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus. He died in Basel in 1966. The book challenges deeply ingrained perceptions of Muslim-Jewish relations during World War II and illuminates their interconnected histories in modern Europe. It also tells the unknown story of Marcus' orientalized Islam that, in echoing Goethe's, revitalized an essential strand of Germany's spiritual heritage"--

The unfinished memoirs of Hugo Gryn (1930-1996), born in Berehove, Ruthenia, completed by his daughter. Ch. 11-13 (pp. 123-229), written by Gryn in the USA in 1951, describe his experiences in the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a teenager. In April 1944 Gryn and his family, with the other Jews of Berehove, were interned in a nearby brick factory. In June 1944 they were deported to Auschwitz. Gryn and his father were then sent to the Lieberose concentration camp in Upper Silesia. Naomi Gryn pieces together the remaining account from various writings and interviews, describing a death march which ended at Gunskirchen. Gryn's father succumbed there, shortly after the liberation; his brother perished at Auschwitz, but his mother survived. Gryn moved to England with a group of child survivors in 1946, and later became a well-known rabbi.