Boy with a Violin: A Story of Survival

On the June 22, 1941, the day war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, childhood ended for 11-year-old violin prodigy Yochanan Fein. The next morning, Yochanan's father made the fateful decision to move his family from the family mill to the relative safety center of Kaunas, Lithuania.

In Boy with a Violin, Fein recounts the remarkable events of his early life--his miraculous survival in the Kaunas Ghetto, and his timely rescue. He details his separation from his parents, his narrow escapes from death, his encounters with Nazi officers, and his time spent hiding in a pit. Yet this was only the beginning. As Lithuania entered the post-World War II era, survivors returned to what was left of their homes and attempted to put back together the fragmented remains of their lives, even as Communist authority was being established. Against this background, Fein tells of his daring escape from Soviet Lithuania to Poland, stealing across the border, and the three years he spent living under assumed identities and mentoring orphaned youth, before immigrating to Israeli in 1950.

In this first English translation of Boy with a Violin, Fein offers testimony to the strength of the human spirit and a message of the evils of racism.