Surviving on Hope

Fourteen-year-old Tom Newman was living in Hungary-occupied Czechoslovakia when he and his family were rounded up by Nazis and sent on trains to the concentration camps. Relying on a mixture of luck and an inexhaustible reservoir of hope, Tom survived a year in Auschwitz and the Death March to Buchenwald, where he came close to dying before the American military arrived. The only survivor from his family of nine, Tom eventually regained his health and made his way to Budapest and later Prague, taken in by loving relatives. In search of his own new home, Tom successfully applied for Canada's War Orphans Project. Settling in Toronto, he completed his education, became a chartered accountant, and built a thriving practice. He also started a family and today, in his nineties, is a doting father and grandfather.