51 Boys Escaped the Gas Chamber. Their Survival Became a Miracle

AUTHOR BACKGROUND

Rabbi Naftali Schiff is a London-based educator, social entrepreneur, and one of the world’s leading collators of Holocaust survivor testimony. Raised in London and educated at Hasmonean High School, he studied at Yeshivat HaKotel in Jerusalem, earned a degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and received rabbinic ordination from the Jerusalem Rabbinate. He served in the IDF’s Givati Brigade before returning to the UK, where he expanded Aish UK and went on to found Jewish Futures, an umbrella of educational organizations including JRoots. Through JRoots he has taken more than 30,000 people to Poland. Over more than two decades he has personally interviewed more than 200 Holocaust survivors, driven by a commitment to preserve their moral authority and transmit their legacy to future generations.

THE BOOK: MIRACLE

Miracle tells the true story of 51 Hungarian Jewish teenage boys who, on Simchat Torah 1944 (October 10), were pulled from a gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the last possible moment. Roughly 800 boys aged 13–17 had been stripped, beaten, and herded into Crematorium 5; their cards were already marked “gestorben” (deceased). Three SS officers arrived and ordered 50 of the strongest to unload a shipment of potatoes. A 51st boy hid among discarded clothing and slipped out with them. Co-written with award-winning journalist Michael Calvin, the book is the result of Schiff’s nearly 20-year search to locate and interview the survivors of this unique event—the only known last-minute mass reprieve from a gas chamber during the Holocaust.

CORE THEMES

The book’s central claim is that this episode, though almost unbelievable, is rigorously documented and carries profound moral and spiritual weight. Schiff and Calvin reject treating it as mere camp folklore. Through painstaking interviews with six of the 51 (including the last living survivor, Hershel Herskovic) and corroborating archival material, they establish a “golden thread of authenticity.” The narrative follows the boys from their ultra-Orthodox childhoods in Hungary, through the mass deportations of 1944, into the gas chamber itself, and out into the lives they later built. The authors present the boys’ survival not as random chance but as a crack of light in absolute darkness—an event that underscores both the calculated evil of the Nazi system and the stubborn life-force of those who emerged. Faith, discipline, and an almost defiant will to live run through the survivors’ accounts.

KEY POINTS

•    On Simchat Torah 1944, 800 boys were selected for death; 51 walked out alive after being chosen (or slipping in) to unload potatoes.

•    The order appears to have come from Johann Schwarzhuber rather than Josef Mengele, though the precise motive remains unclear.

•    Schiff spent nearly two decades tracking survivors across countries; six were extensively interviewed.

•    The boys returned to the barracks and, according to one, danced (hakufos)—an act of defiant joy. 

•    The book situates the episode within the broader destruction of Hungarian Jewry, in which some 440,000 people were deported to Auschwitz in a matter of months. 

•    An accompanying documentary, Undeniable, further preserves the testimonies. 

•    The authors connect the moral urgency of the story to the present, including the resonance of Simchat Torah with the October 7 attacks decades later.

WHY THE BOOK MATTERS 

In an age of fading survivor voices and rising Holocaust denial or distortion, Miracle recovers one of the most extraordinary yet little-known episodes of the Shoah. It refuses both sentimental myth-making and clinical detachment. By centering the boys’ own words and the discipline of their Orthodox upbringing, Schiff and Calvin show how faith and human resilience could survive even inside a gas chamber. The book stands as both historical recovery and moral challenge: anyone who carries an Auschwitz number and retains faith, Schiff has said, possesses the power to bestow blessing. Miracle ensures that power is not lost.
 

To purchase Rabbi Naftali Schiff's book, Miracle: The Boys Who Escaped the Gas Chamber of Auschwitz, click the LINK! 

CREDITS

British rabbi, Jewish educator, social entrepreneur, founder of JRoots, a Jewish heritage and Holocaust education organization.  Co-author of Miracle (with Michael Calvin) and the associated documentary Undeniable.