The astonishing true story of six boys who escaped the gas chambers

If anything could be a harder read than the gruesome testimony of death camp survivors, it is surely a terrifying account of facing extermination head-on from the inside of a gas chamber, stripped naked and watching the doors slamming shut on daylight, fresh air and life itself.

By definition, such a description should only be available from beyond the grave, but 51 teenagers actually lived to tell the tale after a last-minute reprieve that defies belief. And six have shared their memories of what they believed were their final seconds in Auschwitz-Birkenau before a sudden – and banal – demand for strong young bodies to unload a consignment of potatoes saved their lives seconds before those beside them were murdered as intended.

“These survivors shared an amazing life force”, says Holocaust education specialist Rabbi Naftali Schiff, who interviewed the six he was able to track down of the 51 reprieved for a powerful book published today (22 January 2026).

“These were boys who had survived multiple selections after arriving in Auschwitz in 1944 and got one last chance to prove their strength,” he says of the astonishing event which saw three SS officers screeching up on motorbikes as the gas chamber doors were closing. They were seeking just 50 of the fittest of 800 boys aged 13 to 17 who were marched together to their death from Block 11, a holding pen for the condemned.

The boys, who had been starved for nearly two days, had to prove they could still run and do knee-bends in order to survive that final, unimaginable selection. But despite the macabre circumstances of their survival, not so unimaginable is what they did when they got back to the barracks.“’Hakufos,’ one told me – Yiddish for ‘we danced,’” says Schiff, who has interviewed 200 Holocaust survivors over the past 20 years. “‘It was Simchas Torah,’ he said, ‘so we danced.’”

As ever with Angel of Death Josef Mengele, the sadistic camp doctor who took a perverse pleasure in marking Jewish holidays in Auschwitz with special selections to decide the fate of his victims, it was the day before – “Hoshana Rabbah, the last time of judgment, when it is decided who will live or die,” says Schiff – that these boys were condemned to death. They were locked in their barracks, deprived of even bread or water and listed as gestorben – dead, hours before being marched to their planned extermination.

The boys, some of the last to arrive at Auschwitz, still had unimaginable horrors to face after the camp was liberated, from death marches to internment in other camps and life-changing illness for some, and Schiff says those who believed their survival was down to divine intervention were driven by the power of their faith.

“They included Yaakov Yosef Weiss, whom I had to ask for a blessing on his intercom to get him to see me,” says Schiff of the tall, imposing rabbi nicknamed Tarzan who lived in Manchester until he died aged 82. “I knocked on his door two or three days before Yom Kippur to ask, as in Hasidic circles it was decreed by a rebbe that one could go for a blessing to anyone who laid tefillin over a number on their arm. When he answered and eventually agreed to be interviewed, he was the one who told me how they danced back in the barracks.”

Many will speculate that good genes and fitness had most to do with survival, leading to the long and full lives enriched by the large families of many known survivors, which propagated new generations of Jewish life against all the odds: “I’m sure there are at least 1,000 descendants of the six,” says Schiff.

Hershel Herskovic, who lives in Stamford Hill, contracted typhus and had gone blind by the time he arrived in the UK as a refugee, yet managed to study law, establish a successful business, marry, have four children and bring them up alone after the death of his wife in 1978.  Blindness did not even stop him riding a bike.

It is not only the 51 teenagers who walked out of the gas chambers who experienced a miracle that day – on their way back to the barracks they passed a second group of boys who gazed at their condemned campmates in disbelief before they were also turned back from their own march to the gas chamber.  They included 13-year-old Avigdor Neumann, who, following his reprieve, survived into his 90s and went on to have two children, seven grandchildren, 43 great-grandchildren, five great-great-grandchildren and one great-great-great-grandchild to date.

“His eyewitness account was really important to the story”, says Schiff’s co-author Michael Calvin, who personally met Herskovic, at 99 one of only two living survivors of the six interviewed by Schiff: “His clarity of recall was quite remarkable. There was a joyousness to him, and I have an image in my head of him laughing; you can still see the mischievous little boy he was 90 years ago. He has that distinctive life force which emanates from all these survivors; in meeting them you’re touching history. It was a huge privilege to meet him.”

The fact the 51 boys were reprieved on Simchat Torah is not a coincidence, believes Schiff, who points out: “Mengele was so depraved he made selections on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur 1944 before declaring these survivors of those previous selections ‘dead’ on the eve of Simchat Torah.”

And although in 1944 October 7 fell three days before that final high holiday, a circle with that now-notorious and tragic date was closed for Schiff when he recently discovered a sculpture of women at Yad Vashem commemorating a unique act of resistance. “They had smuggled explosives into the antechamber of a gas chamber in order to blow it up – on October 7, 1944. Learning the story of those brave women reinforced why I wanted to put the book out – because amidst all the darkness and despair and tragedy and loss, somehow these 51 boys escaped, and I had the privilege to meet six of them and witness their steely will to survive.”

Perhaps none so much as the one who was the greatest miracle of all – the unknown, but universally remembered, boy too tiny to be selected who twigged that some of the bigger boys were about to be released. He sidled up to their line, unseen, hid himself in discarded clothing and walked out behind them into the life and light to which the hundreds less lucky originally herded in with them had just bidden an anguished farewell.

Miracle is published by Bantam, £22.

To attend a book launch and film screening in London or Manchester from 25 January visit jfutures.org/miracle