Avrumele: A Memoir

Avrumele: A Memoir is a first-person account of Albert Hepner’s experiences as a hidden child during the Nazi hunt for Jews in German-occupied Brussels during World War II. This memoir is written from the perspective of a frightened child whose father has died, leaving him and his widowed mother to fend for themselves as the Gestapo closes in on them. Ultimately, mother and son must separate to survive, leaving the bewildered child in the care and protection of his young adult cousin Motl, a physician.

This is a story of the terror, occasionally mixed with humor, of a child who is moved from one tenuous sanctuary to another. It is also a chronicle of the incredible courage of the non-Jewish Belgians who risked their own lives to try to protect these helpless victims of the Holocaust.