With the hand of a master, as in a detective story, Yossi Sarid describes the long search by Jozef-Petr-Pepiczek for his identity. But this is more than a personal quest; it is the quest of many Jews for their private and national identity. Yossi Sarid is a faithful mouthpiece for Pepiczek and for the family he lost and for the tortured Mengele twins and for the dwarfs who were tortured with them. Yossi Sarid, politician and poet, sees himself as the emissary of Petr-Pepiczek; precisely because Petr Grunfeld “was silent and kept his memories hidden”, Sarid felt that it was his mission to take him out of hiding and commit his life story to Yad Vashem.
“The book gathers up silence and words into only 14 pages of family history, very few members of which remained alive… Thus he very delicately transmits the shards of the life story of the youngest boy in the [Mengele experimental] bloc, who was found sleeping in the snow on liberation day. That day was the beginning of a new ordeal during which he was adopted then orphaned again, lost his name and found it again, only to be given more and more new names.” [Ofra Rosenfeld, Ha’aretz]
