Auschwitz: My First Train Journey. The story of an 8-year-old boy in 1939, nothing to do with religion or the geopolitics of today.
Eight-year-old Kurt Stein has always viewed the world through the safe, admiring gaze of a boy who idolises his older brother and is wrapped in the warmth of a large, loving family. Living with his parents, grandparents, and five siblings in Warsaw, he knows comfort, tradition, and the unshakable belief that childhood is about being loved and nurtured.
But when the Nazi occupation tightens its grip on the city, the Steins’ privileged life collapses over just a few months. Their home is seized, their freedoms stripped, and their safety becomes a memory. Forced into the suffocating confines of the Warsaw Ghetto, Kurt watches his parents under the weight of fear, and his heroic brother ties desperately to protect them all from a world that has turned suddenly and brutally merciless.
As hunger, terror, and despair rise inside the ghetto walls, the inevitable knock comes, a summons to ‘relocation.’ Herded with thousands of others to the trains, believing that wherever they go, his family will stay together. But the train waiting before them is not a passage to safety. It is a machine of disappearance. A journey with no return.
Dedication: For my father, Chief Petty Officer, Congellous Sydney Jones, who fought through the Second World War and remained in the Royal Navy until 1952, clearing mines and his teenage brother, Stanley, who was killed in action aboard HMS Charybdis, a light cruiser from World War II. She was part of the Dido-class cruisers and sank in 1943 off the coast of Brittany after being torpedoed by German ships. Stanley was just 17 years old…When I began writing, I did not set out to write this story, but because of my father, I knew one day I would write a story set in World War 2. For years, it waited, quiet and patient, like a shadow at the edge of memory. When the idea began, it was not in a library or archive but at a small green baize table, under the clatter of poker chips. My inspiration called himself Stanley. He was like many elderly men I had known, wry, observant, and well-mannered with a measured way of speaking that suggested he had long ago learned the value of silence. We played cards together for months before I noticed it. A faint marking on his arm, partially hidden by the cuff of his sleeve. Numbers. Blue, blurred with time, but unmistakable. An Auschwitz identity tattoo.I asked him about it only once. He paused, not with reluctance, but with the weight of something that could never be fully spoken. Then he told me, simply, that his name was not Stanley. It was Kurt. It had been changed when he came to England after the war, given to him by the family who raised him, who tried, perhaps in kindness, to give him a life untouched by what came before, but the past does not loosen its grip so easily. That night, the man across the table was no longer just a companion in cards; he was a witness to one of the darkest chapters in human history. I did not ask anything about his ordeal, nor did he tell me anything. He did not need to. The faded ink carried more truth than any story ever could. This novel was born in that silence. It is not Kurt’s story; it is a work of fiction, shaped by imagination, research, and the echoes of many voices that history has tried, and failed, to erase. Yet at its heart lies a single, undeniable truth: behind every number was a name, a life, a torturous world that once existed. ‘Auschwitz’ is not just a place. It is a wound that never fully healed, a reminder of what happens when humanity is stripped of compassion, and when ordinary lives are swept into extraordinary horror.
Genre: Historical
Eight-year-old Kurt Stein has always viewed the world through the safe, admiring gaze of a boy who idolises his older brother and is wrapped in the warmth of a large, loving family. Living with his parents, grandparents, and five siblings in Warsaw, he knows comfort, tradition, and the unshakable belief that childhood is about being loved and nurtured.
But when the Nazi occupation tightens its grip on the city, the Steins’ privileged life collapses over just a few months. Their home is seized, their freedoms stripped, and their safety becomes a memory. Forced into the suffocating confines of the Warsaw Ghetto, Kurt watches his parents under the weight of fear, and his heroic brother ties desperately to protect them all from a world that has turned suddenly and brutally merciless.
As hunger, terror, and despair rise inside the ghetto walls, the inevitable knock comes, a summons to ‘relocation.’ Herded with thousands of others to the trains, believing that wherever they go, his family will stay together. But the train waiting before them is not a passage to safety. It is a machine of disappearance. A journey with no return.
Dedication: For my father, Chief Petty Officer, Congellous Sydney Jones, who fought through the Second World War and remained in the Royal Navy until 1952, clearing mines and his teenage brother, Stanley, who was killed in action aboard HMS Charybdis, a light cruiser from World War II. She was part of the Dido-class cruisers and sank in 1943 off the coast of Brittany after being torpedoed by German ships. Stanley was just 17 years old…When I began writing, I did not set out to write this story, but because of my father, I knew one day I would write a story set in World War 2. For years, it waited, quiet and patient, like a shadow at the edge of memory. When the idea began, it was not in a library or archive but at a small green baize table, under the clatter of poker chips. My inspiration called himself Stanley. He was like many elderly men I had known, wry, observant, and well-mannered with a measured way of speaking that suggested he had long ago learned the value of silence. We played cards together for months before I noticed it. A faint marking on his arm, partially hidden by the cuff of his sleeve. Numbers. Blue, blurred with time, but unmistakable. An Auschwitz identity tattoo.I asked him about it only once. He paused, not with reluctance, but with the weight of something that could never be fully spoken. Then he told me, simply, that his name was not Stanley. It was Kurt. It had been changed when he came to England after the war, given to him by the family who raised him, who tried, perhaps in kindness, to give him a life untouched by what came before, but the past does not loosen its grip so easily. That night, the man across the table was no longer just a companion in cards; he was a witness to one of the darkest chapters in human history. I did not ask anything about his ordeal, nor did he tell me anything. He did not need to. The faded ink carried more truth than any story ever could. This novel was born in that silence. It is not Kurt’s story; it is a work of fiction, shaped by imagination, research, and the echoes of many voices that history has tried, and failed, to erase. Yet at its heart lies a single, undeniable truth: behind every number was a name, a life, a torturous world that once existed. ‘Auschwitz’ is not just a place. It is a wound that never fully healed, a reminder of what happens when humanity is stripped of compassion, and when ordinary lives are swept into extraordinary horror.
Genre: Historical
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