I wasn’t alone

Born into a Manouche family marked by war and hardship, Daniel grows up in a world that leaves him little room. As a child, he knows hunger, cold, suspicious looks, and closed doors. Rejected at school, despised in the street. Being Manouche means carrying a wound no one sees, but that is felt in every moment.Yet over the years and through hardship, hands reach out. A colonel who teaches him to read. A headmaster who trusts him. A friend who becomes his brother in heart. Simple, generous souls who change the course of a life.This book is the testimony of a man who endured everything - persecution, abandonment, poverty, grief - without ever losing his dignity or his pride. A man who travelled to Auschwitz-Birkenau to see with his own eyes his ancestors' names carved in stone. He came back broken, but standing.I Was Not Alone is a book about memory, resilience, and the quiet strength of a free people that history has too often tried to erase."I am Manouche. And I am proud of it." MEHRSTEIN Daniel 2026