He was known first as a Warsaw ghetto smuggler, then as Comandante Enrico. He traveled under false identity papers and worked at a German border patrol station. Throughout the years of the Holocaust, Hermann Wygoda lived a life of narrow escapes, daring masquerades, and battles that almost defy reason.

 

Unique among Holocaust memoirs, In the Shadow of the Swastika, now in paperback, celebrates the memory of a man who received decorations from three Western powers and who, years later, was honored posthumously by the Italian city he helped to liberate.

Hermann Wygoda was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. He kept a journal of his experiences in the mountains of northern Italy. Mark Wygoda is a professor and head of the biology and health sciences department at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Michael Berenbaum, a prolific writer, lecturer, and teacher on the Holocaust, is a professor of Jewish studies and the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, and he formerly served as president and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles.