Salomon Isacovici

Salomon Isacovici became an Ecuadorian citizen in 1958, born to a farming family in Transylvania in 1924. He became a witness to the atrocities of World War II surviving the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He wrote “Man of Ashes”, his autobiography, chronicling his youth in Romania and the never ending punishment of Birkenau and Auschwitz. Lucky to escape during a massacre, he was shot, recaptured, and sent to another concentration camp, Gross Rosen. He was still there when U.S. soldiers liberated the camp. At war's end he returned to his home only to find another family living there. He wondered trough Europe till he immigrated to Ecuador only to find that the Ecuadorian Indians lived in infrahuman conditions comparable to those of the concentration camps that he had experienced before. His story was first published in Mexico in 1990 as A7393: Hombre de Cenizas obtaining the Fernando Yeno literary prize. The English translation was written by Dick Gerdes, a professor at George Mason University. Salomon Isacovici passed away in February 1998, exactly one year before the launching of the English version of Man of Ashes published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Elie Wiesel, Novel Prize winner commented on "Man of Ashes":

"I began reading it and felt moved as I do whenever I read personal memoirs by survivors. I have always believed in survivors’ testimonies: they are unique. What they say about what was done to Jews by their enemies cannot be said by anyone else. Their personal experience must become part of Holocaust literature.

Sincerely,

[Elie Wiesel ,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel] "