The Train to Auschwitz tells the extraordinary story of a Jewish child who survived the Holocaust in Slovakia by an almost impossible chain of events. In 1942, Vera, an eight-year-old girl, was on a train from the concentration camp at Sereď, in western Slovakia, bound for Auschwitz. Had she arrived there, she would certainly have been murdered. Instead, close to the holding camp at Žilina, she escaped.

Tudor Parfitt reconstructs Vera’s story and, through it, the wider history of Slovak Jewry between 1939 and 1945: the destruction of Jewish schools and synagogues, forced labour, petty humiliations, the fragile system of exemptions for doctors and other “useful” Jews, and the Slovak government’s decision to pay Nazi Germany to remove its Jews — a policy that led to deportation and extermination.

When Parfitt first heard Vera's story in Brooklyn, many details had been obscured by time. To recover them, he undertook research journeys through Slovakia in 2023 and 2024, retracing her wartime steps and encountering archivists, scholars, priests, local historians, socialites, drunks, and antisemites. Part Holocaust history, part life history, and part literary travel account, the book follows a trail of memory, doubt, and discovery through wartime and present-day Slovakia.