B’nai Shalom, CA Book Talk

4-5 pm Pacific / 7-8 pm Eastern

Unstop­pable is the ulti­mate immi­grant sto­ry, an epic David-and-Goliath adven­ture and an inspir­ing man­u­al for sur­vival in the face of tremen­dous odds. As peo­ple emerge from the dev­as­ta­tion wrought by the glob­al COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, the true-life sto­ry of Sig­gi Wilzig offers a roadmap for re-invention.

While Amer­i­can teens were social­iz­ing in ice cream par­lors, Sig­gi was suf­fer­ing beat­ings by Nazi hood­lums for being a Jew and was soon deport­ed along with his fam­i­ly to Auschwitz. Sig­gi used his wits to stay alive, invent­ing skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp. After two death march­es, near star­va­tion, he was lib­er­at­ed from Mau­thausen and went to work for the US Army hunt­ing Nazis, which earned him a visa to Amer­i­ca. He began his career sell­ing neck­ties from the trunk of his car, and in lit­tle more than a decade rose to become CEO of both a pub­licly trad­ed oil com­pa­ny and a bank with assets in excess of $4 billion.

Sig­gi’s sto­ry is a riv­et­ing nar­ra­tive of grit, cun­ning, luck, and the deter­mi­na­tion to live.

Joshua Greene (Jus­tice at Dachau: The Tri­als of an Amer­i­can Pros­e­cu­tor) is a renowned Holo­caust schol­ar and film­mak­er whose biogra­phies have sold more than a half-mil­lion copies world­wide. Greene is a pop­u­lar lec­tur­er and his doc­u­men­taries on Holo­caust his­to­ry have aired on PBS and Dis­cov­ery. He has appeared on nation­al media out­lets from NPR​’s Fresh Air with Ter­ry Gross to FOX News, CNN, and more.