Tatae’s Promise

Tatae's Promise: You will live… You will tell Internationally acclaimed. 13 Awards. "Riveting, Inspiring Masterpiece... Nothing short of brilliant... I will never forget it." Inspired by a never-before-told, true story of a young woman's escape from Auschwitz with her sister, Tatae's Promise is an extraordinary narrative of unimaginable courage, family, faith and enduring love. Experience Hinda's breathtaking life as it transforms from living in a happy home, to banishment to a ghetto, to prison, to the Auschwitz death camp, to escape, and then miraculously rebuilding her life. In 1940, Hinda was eighteen years old when an axe crashed through the front door of her home in Poland. Nazi soldiers swarmed inside, herded the family into an army truck and hauled them away for one reason: They were Jews. After thirty-two months of subsisting on a starvation diet, sleeping on a wooden floor in the Mlawa ghetto, Hinda was deported to Auschwitz. When incarcerated there for an additional two years, Hinda endured rabid hunger, slave labor, life threatening diseases, and barbarous brutalities while clinging to her father's promise: "I know for certain that you will live, and you will tell." These twelve words—a powerful presage written by her father, Tatae, in a letter to Hinda mere hours before the Gestapo murdered him—fueled her will to persevere. Incredibly, at the age of twenty-three, Hinda devised a daring plot to escape the exhaustively guarded gates of Auschwitz with her younger sister, Rachel. Hinda brilliantly executed the plan only to find the two of them running for their lives—from both Germans and Russians. Two subplots, featuring pivotal characters Wolf Yoskowitz and Dr. Walter Zeilhofen, intertwine with Hinda's life in surprising ways. Wolf, a young Jewish man, struggles to endure the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp. Walter, a young German doctor, who risks his life, committing treason by secretly issuing curative medications to prisoners, reluctantly works at Auschwitz under the thumb of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, "The Angel of Death." According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, there are less than two hundred documented, successful "prisoner escapes" from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of them were men. Hinda and Rachel's victorious escape was truly remarkable.