Michael Kopiec was born in Munich, Germany in April 1946, two days before the first anniversary of Adolf Hitler's suicide. He was the first Jewish child born in Munich after the war, and quite possibly the first born anywhere in Germany. His parents, Misha and Liza Kopiec, were both Holocaust survivors.

The family settled in a suburb of Munich where Misha built a thriving import and export business. The extensive travel that business required was not incidental. Misha had made himself a promise during his two years as a prisoner at Auschwitz: that he would keep a meticulous mental record of every atrocity he witnessed and every act of sadism inflicted upon him and his fellow prisoners, and that he would one day find the men responsible and hold them to account. The business gave him the means and the cover to do exactly that. Misha Kopiec was, by any honest description, a Nazi hunter - and he kept his promise.

When Michael was three years old, a large piece of furniture fell on him, severely fracturing his femur. The injury required months of hospitalization and several operations. It was during that long ordeal - a small boy in a hospital bed in postwar Munich - that he found his calling. He would become a doctor.

At age four, still wearing a brace on his not yet fully healed leg, Michael emigrated to the United States with his parents and younger brother Garry. They crossed the Atlantic aboard the USS General S. D. Sturgis (AP-137), a former military transport that had served as a troopship through World War II and the Korean War, and arrived through Ellis Island. They came with nothing.

Life in America was difficult. The family had no surviving relatives to turn to and no means of support. Liza had been orphaned since the age of twelve. Misha was a decorated soldier, a combat veteran, a man of extraordinary resourcefulness - but he had no marketable civilian skills. Too proud to seek government assistance, Misha and Liza both found work as nurse's aides in a hospital. From those rough beginnings, they built careers: Liza became a certified operating room nurse, and Misha became a licensed X-ray technician. They did not ask for help. They built something from nothing, as they had always done.

The eldest of four children, Michael learned English quickly, played baseball and football through middle and high school, and went on to college and medical school, where he graduated with honors. He became a board-certified OB/GYN specialist and practiced the profession he loved for nearly two decades.

That career ended without warning. On his way to perform surgery, Michael was struck by a drunk driver. The collision left him with a permanent injury to one eye - an injury incompatible with the precision demands of surgical practice. The profession he had chosen at the age of three, lying in a Munich hospital bed, was taken from him in an instant.

Faced with that loss, Michael returned to something he had been carrying for years: hundreds of pages of notes from a lifetime of private conversations with his father. He spent three years cross-referencing those notes against historical records, military documents, geographic data, and Misha's recorded testimony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), before writing a single word of narrative. The result was a manuscript exceeding one thousand pages, subsequently divided into two books: The Outrage: A Testament of War, Survival, and Moral Courage, published under Essington House Books, the imprint he founded with his wife and editor, Margie Kopiec, and An Impossible Promise: A Love Story, currently being prepared for release by Amsterdam Publishers, Europe's leading specialist publisher of Holocaust memoirs.

Those books were written first to honor his parents, Misha and Liza, to remember the family that was murdered, and to ensure that the millions who were silenced are not forgotten. They are being released now for an equally urgent reason. Misha's lived truth, verified at every turn and preserved in the USHMM archive, is a direct and documented answer to the Holocaust distortion and denial that accompany the present upsurge in antisemitism. If there was ever a time when these books were needed to speak truth to lies, it is now.

Michael Kopiec lives in San Diego, California, with his wife Margie. Together they have two sons, two daughters, and six grandchildren. The Nazis did not win.