In a heartwarming scene in the film Schindler's List,viewers the world over witnessed the miracle of two Jews being married clandestinely in the Plaszow concentration camp. A silver spoon, concealed in the barracks rafters, yielded the rings they exchanged. A camp bunk became their wedding bed. Those two were Joseph and Rebecca Bau. Rebecca was the manicurist of Amon Goeth, the sadistic commandant. Joseph was a brilliant graphic artist employed as a draftsman in making signs and maps.

Available for the first time in English, Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?is Joseph Bau's reckoning of a time of horror but also of beauty and wonder. Whether recounting the bombing of Krakow, the daring exploits of his brother in the ghetto, the brutality of the camp, love at first sight, or the unrelenting hunger, the author writes with warmth and directness. His triumphant humanity informs his account of the Holocaust from beginning to end. Bau sets the daily struggle for existance in the ghetto against the savage German "actions," roundups for transports to the camps. As prisoner number 69084, he guides the reader on a tour of Plaszow, reconstructing at once the camp and the experiences of a prisoner who both fell in love and watched his father being executed there. As number 247 on the men's section of Schindler's list, he tells of his survival in Schindler's factory in Czechoslovakia and his remarkable reunion with his wife after the war. And as a "graduate of the camps, he tells in several anecdotes and poems of the psychic aftermath of the Holocaust, how its unending consequences permeate the survivors' daily lives. Throughout, the author balances the miracles with the atrocities, and the grimness of events with the humor, resiliency, and love that helped him transcend the unspeakable, to create this unique and uplifting testament.

Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?contains more than sixty illustrations by the artist, including his maps of the Krakow ghetto and of the Plaszow concentration camp (drafted while he was an inmate), and a portrait of Oskar Schindler. A reproduction of his mother Tzilah Bau's identity card (Kennkarte)can be found on the front endpaper.