Moshe’s family moves from Warsaw, Poland, to Paris, France, in 1929 to try to build a better life for themselves and, indeed, things do look up for them for a while. But in 1942, Germans begin to deport all foreign-born Jews, including Moshe and his family. Moshe has always been a tough kid, and he has even had training as a boxer, but nothing has prepared him for the horrors of Auschwitz, where the strongest among them survives for three weeks at the most. Thanks to his streetwise survival skills and brute physical strength, Moshe manages to survive for more than three years, and lives to tell the story of the daily brutality he and others faced at the hands of the Nazis. Based on the life of one of the author’s family friends, Greif’s novel doesn’t shy away from the horrific details recounted by Holocaust survivors. (Age 14 and older)

Moshe Wisniak was born weak, with legs powerless to flee Warsaw’s anti Semitic bullies. So he learned to fight and think and defend himself. A move to Paris transformed him to Maurice, and coaching honed his skills as a boxer. The Nazis sentenced him to Auschwitz, but boxing kept him alive. The SS guards recognized his athletic prowess almost immediately and pitted Maurice against a Muselman, a dying inmate, but Maurice refused to play their game. As a result, he was mercilessly pummeled but learned to survive. The Fighter’s first-person narrative voice brings immediacy to this factually based Holocaust novel. 2007 USBBY Outstanding International Books List, CCBC Choices, NYPL Books for the Teen Age, and School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, the French award for best YA novel in 2000—five French awards altogether. lmp

Originally published as Le Ring de la Mort in French by l’Êcole des Loisirs France, in 1998. Translated by the author.

Fighting is a way of life for Moshe Wisniak. As a boy from a very poor neighborhood in Warsaw, he can't run away when Polish kids attack the Jews, because his legs are weak. So he learns to use his fists, his head and other weapons to defend himself and his brothers.

When the family moves to Paris in 1929, everyone finds work and life improves slowly. Moshe, now Maurice, is a leather worker and a young husband. At a Jewish sports club, he takes up boxing, and becomes an amateur flyweight. But the war comes to Paris, and by 1942, the French police round up foreign Jews and the Germans deport them by the hundreds every day. They send Maurice to the death camp at Auschwitz.

In the camp, SS officers sense Maurice's strength. They command him to box against a dying prisoner. Now Maurice is faced with an impossible moral dilemma: kill the prisoner or be killed by the SS for refusing to obey them. Or will he find a way out?

Translated from French by award-winning author Jean-Jacques Greif, The Fighter isn't simply another book about the Holocaust. It is a book about a hero who discovers the death-defying power of his own humanity.