Sinai Adler, Your Rod and Your Staff: A Young Man’s Chronicle of Survival (Feldheim, 1992)

Sinai Adler was born in Prague into a religious family who had produced generations of rabbis.

He was the youngest son of Rabbi Simon Adler and Rosalie Shiffer. Adler had two brothers, one of whom died as a baby. His eldest brother, Matisyahu, left Czechoslovakia for Palestine in 1939.Adler’s father’s social status meant the family were not deported to Theresienstadt Ghetto until March 1943. In Theresienstadt, his father continued to work as a rabbi and he, like many of the children, worked in the vegetable garden.

He remained with his father in the Hanover Barracks until May 1944, when he was deported with his parents to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.

Adler’s parents were murdered on arrival. Adler says in his memoirs that they were aware that they would be killed. Adler, however, was taken to work in a forced labour battalion. Until this point he did not speak Yiddish. The family had spoken Czech and German at home.

The book details religious resistance in Auschwitz.