By My Own Authority

“I want to stay alive!”

This was the anguished cry of twenty-year-old Marian Pretzel, a young Jewish art student in Lvov, Poland. The year was 1942: the Germans had occupied Lvov and brought with them all the horrors of their persecution of the Jewish race.

Marian’s parents had been taken away by the Gestapo.

Marian Pretzel did survive: BY MY OWN AUTHORITY is the fascinating and compelling account of how he devised his own unique method of staying alive… by forgery. He knew the Germanic obsession with correct documentary procedure, and their respect for an official stamp: combining this knowledge with his artistic skill, he not only survived, but was able to obtain food, shelter and travel for himself and his youthful companions. He experienced many perilous moments during those years of war; fear lurked constantly by his side. But there were exhilarating moments, too-when a young boy succeeded, time after time, in his audacious schemes to hoodwink the enemy.

After the war, Marian Pretzel lived in Palestine (now Israel) for a while, and eventually came to Australia. As an Epilogue to his autobiography, he relates how, forty years after the end of the war, he returned to eastern Europe with his friend Janek, to revisit the scenes of their most daring scheme of all, the rescue of a young girl from the doomed ghetto in Budapest.