Michael Freedland, Ben Helfgott – The Story of One of The Boys (Valentine Mitchell, 2018)

This is not just the story of another Holocaust survivor. There is nothing about Ben Helfgott that is usual. After all, very few survivors would, just a few years after liberation, become Olympic athletes. He did exactly that. He was a boy growing up in a small Polish town, Piotrków, when his whole life changed as the Nazis moved in during the first week of the Second World War. As a small child he was top of his class – everything he did was of a standard beyond that of any of his classmates. Multi-lingual, he read newspapers and watched films that were beyond his years.