Edmund Szybicki was a teenager when the Germans invaded his homeland, Poland. Despite Poland fighting for its life, the country fell to the stronger German army, but did not surrender. Amidst the oppression, enforced segregation and bloodshed, a powerful resistance network prevailed, in which Szybicki himself was engaged. One fateful night during the Warsaw uprising, by the end of August 1944, he was among a group of people who were rounded up and transported to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Szybicki relates the horrors of his time there as he recalls them. His post-liberation story however, is one of success and defiance in the face of a traumatic past. As he moved from Sweden (where he met his late wife) to Spain and on to Switzerland, developing his career as a celebrated telecommunications and computing expert, his life was not without fresh sorrows, but is nevertheless a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. To Hope or Die is a survivor's personal account of one of the twentieth century's single greatest evils, as well as telling the story of the life, cruelly cut short, of a girl he could not forget.
