Survivor

Sam Pivnik is a survivor of a world that no longer exists - on 14 occasions, he should have been killed. On his 13th birthday, the Nazis invaded Poland. He survived two ghettoes and 6 months on Auschwitz's notorious Rampkommando where prisoners were either sent to camp or gassed. After this, he was sent to work at the brutal Furstengrube mining camp. As the Third Reich collapsed, he was only one of a handful of people who swam to safety after the RAF sank his prison ship. Settling in London, he found people too preoccupied with their own experiences on the Home Front to be interested in what had happened to him. Now in his eighties, he tells his story for the first time.