The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz

An inspiring true story of barbarity, hope, and survival: the Holocaust memoir of a teenage boy imprisoned in Birkenau, Auschwitz, Gross Rosen, and Buchenwald which illuminate the dark days of World War II, told in words and dozens of his own color drawings.

During the Second World War, Thomas Geve, along with his mother, was deported and imprisoned in a series of Nazi death camps. For the next 22 months, the adolescent boy suffered horrific brutality at the hands of Hitler’s SS, and witnessed mass murder as his fellow inmates were crowded into the camps’ gas chambers. Surrounded by death, he somehow found the will to live.

Miraculously, Thomas endured. At eighteen, he was freed. During the nearly two years of his captivity, the teenager made a visual record of life in the death camps in drawings that captured both the shocking—scenes of infamous danger and darkness, including victims lined up to enter the gas chambers—as well as the mundane, portraits of his fellow prisoners going about their daily assigned routines.

Decades after they were created, Thomas’s drawings are carefully preserved at the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre at Yad Vashem in Israel. Like other survivors, Thomas was compelled to share the truth to honor the millions, including his friends, whose voices were silenced during the Holocaust. The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz is the unique living testimony, illustrated with nearly 80 color illustrations, of a young man whose innocence was stolen, yet who refused to succumb to despair. It is an inspiring true story of one person’s quest for survival, hope, and change.