One morning while on duty as an Emergency Room Physician I had the unpleasant duty of pronouncing a patient dead who had arrived in full cardiac arrest. The patient had extensive lung cancer and his body was terribly wasted. I noticed numbers tattooed on his arm and realized they were from the German concentration camps. I commented to his son that his father had endured a hard life, first surviving the death camps, then struggling with lung cancer to the very end. The son informed me his dad had survived the death camps by shining the boots of the S.S. Officers, and he had been given the nickname "The ShoeShine Boy" while in the camps. We talked for a while. It seemed to give him a sense of peace to talk about his dad. I learned that while in the death camps his dad had tended to his family by removing them from the gas chambers and brought them to the crematorium. Even at the young age of 14 he would not let anyone help him. This was his family and he alone would tend to them. What a sad story this man had lived through. I then had the opportunity to look through his journal of his time in the death camps. Based on that I started "The ShoeShine Boy". The first chapter is a compilation of his story, though fictionalized. After the first chapter the remainder of the book takes place in the year 2001, nevertheless, what this young man endured in the camp guides and drives the story.
I recently had a patient comment that they had seen my novel "The ShoeShine Boy" in a local bookstore. He was very old and smiled as he said, "You know there was a real person called The ShoeShine Boy." They had been old friends from town. I smiled and simply said, "Yes I know, and he was a remarkable person."
