Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts . . .
Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those four walls, brightly adorned with hand-painted cartoons, the youngest prisoners were kept vermin-free, received better food, and were even taught to imagine having full stomachs and a day without fear. Their guiding light was a twenty-seven-year-old gay, Jewish athlete: Fredy Hirsch.
Being a teacher in a brutal concentration camp was no mean feat. Forced to beg senior SS officers for better provisions, Fredy risked his life every day to protect his beloved children from mortal danger.
But time was running out for Fredy and the hundreds in his care. Could this kind, compassionate, and brave man find a way to teach them the one lesson they really needed to know: how to survive?
Wendy Holden (aka Taylor Holden) is a novelist, non-fiction author, historical biographer and ghostwriter as well as a former journalist for the London Daily Telegraph. Her books have sold two million copies, have been adapted for television and radio, and some have been adopted into the schools curriculum. Two of her titles are about to be made into major Hollywood films.
Since leaving newspapers in 1996, Wendy has written more than forty books, including sixteen international bestsellers and the acclaimed novel The Sense of Paper, published by Random House, New York, now available as an ebook. Her bestselling title is Born Survivors, the true story of three young mothers who hid their pregnancies from the Nazis and gave birth in the camps. This has now been published in 22 countries and translated into 16 languages and was released in a special VE Day 75 edition in 2020. She also wrote the memoir Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day and his Life Lessons with Captain Sir Tom Moore, both of which became top ten bestsellers and remained in the charts for over eight months.
A reporter for eighteen years, Wendy covered news events at home and abroad, including conflicts in the Middle East, Communist Europe, and Northern Ireland. Her non-fiction titles have chiefly been the autobiographies of remarkable women, many with wartime experiences such as Zuzana Ruzickova, who survived three concentration camps and slave labour to become one of the world's leading musicians (now an award winning documentary), and Edna Adan Ismail, an inspirational midwife, First Lady, civil war survivor, and builder of hospitals. Wendy also wrote Tomorrow to be Brave, about the only woman in the French Foreign Legion during World War II (soon to be a film). Her book Behind Enemy Lines was about a young Jewish woman who repeatedly crossed German lines as a spy (now an award winning animation); and Til the Sun Grows Cold tells of a British mother whose daughter was killed in troubled Sudan. She also wrote Lady Blue Eyes, the memoir of Frank Sinatra's widow Barbara, A Lotus Grows in the Mud, the best-selling autobiography of Hollywood actress Goldie Hawn, and Memories Are Made of This, a biography of Dean Martin as seen through the eyes of his daughter Deana.
She penned Ten Mindful Minutes with Goldie Hawn, an international bestseller on mindfulness for parents, and she wrote an ebook for children and adults entitled Mr. Scraps about a dog caught up in the London Blitz. In 2012 she conceived and wrote the bestselling memoir of Uggie, the dog from the Oscar winning movie The Artist, published in 12 countries, and she also wrote Haatchi & Little B, the remarkable story of the relationship between a disabled boy and his three legged-dog, which was a number 1 bestseller in the UK, Portugal, and the US as it melted hearts around the world.
Other works have included the bestselling novelisations of the films The Full Monty and Waking Ned, as well as an Antarctic travel guide with comedian Billy Connolly. She wrote Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking with Pauline Prescott, and Heaven and Hell with Don Felder, co-founder of The Eagles. Her book Shell Shock, a searing investigation into the trauma of conflict from the World War One to the Gulf War, was published in conjunction with a four-part television documentary.
Several of her books have been serialised in national newspapers and magazines around the globe, selected for audio extracts on BBC Radio's Book of the Week and elsewhere, adopted for the curriculum in schools and colleges and transferred to both commercial television and radio drama. Four of her books have been optioned for film. She also writes screenplays, is an international public speaker, literary festival chair, and teaches creative writing online and at exclusive venues in Italy, Dubai, and around the UK.
