Tales of Grabowski: Transformations, Escape and Other Stories

John Auerbach was born in Warsaw in 1922, and served as a soldier in the Polish army at the beginning of the Second World War. During the German occupation, he escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and worked on German ships as a stoker under a false identity. He was caught trying to escape to Sweden in a stolen boat, and was sent to the Stutthof concentration camp. After the war, he went to Sweden and worked on Swedish ships. Here, he joined the Mossad Aliyah B and transported refugees to Israel for three years. He was captured by the British and was detained in a Cyprus camp for two years. On his release to Israel, he came to Kibbutz Sdot Yam, where he was a skipper of fishing boats.After Officers Training in Acre, he served as a Chief Engineer in the Israeli Merchant Marines for fifteen ears. Upon the death of his son in the 1973 War, he left the sea and returned to the Kibbutz where he wrote and published twelve books of short stories and novellas (translated into Hebrew), as well as stories published in American literary magazines.Auerbach's short story, "The Owl", was awarded First Prize in the first PEN/UNESCO Awards in 1993. He died in 2002.