Isaac Thau's Killing Me Off: The Many Lives of Rubin Thau (unpriced, 2021) is an excellent, privately published biography of a Shoah survivor who lived in Vancouver from 1996 to 2006, as prepared by his son, Isaac. Rubin Thau, who bore a strong resemblance to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, lived in Winnipeg from 1947 to 1996 after a stint in Israel from 1944 to 1947. Born and raised in the Austrian town of Zablotov, Rubin Thau was an Ashkenazi Jew descended from Thessalonica, Greece. In 1941, he was loaded onto a cattle car after a Nazi raid on his hometown of Zablotov, in Austria, on December 22nd, but he managed to jump off with two others as they were crossing the River Prut. The other two men were shot and killed. Rubin was shot twice in the leg but managed to bind his wounds with spider webs and walk back to Zablotov where he found his house abandoned. He grabbed some family photos (reproduced in the book) and some hidden jewelry and coins that enabled him to pay a farmer to hide him. When he ran out of money, the farmer forced him to flee. Rubin escaped to Poland, where he mostly hid in forests. He tried to gain refuge with an aunt on his father's side who lived in Czechoslovakia but when he arrived she exclaimed, in German, "All you Polish Jews are going to get us all killed!" He wrote off that branch of the family forever. Captured by the Russians, he was roped and dragged behind a horse for a kilometre. Placed on a transport to Siberia, he told the Russians he was a mechanic and was inducted into the engineering corps for approximately one year. He escaped to Czernowitz, Romania, only sixty kilometres from Zablotov. He was recaptured in Dragasani, 600 kilometres away, but managed to obtain a Romanian Army coat and a false passport. He finally found the Jewish Underground in Bucharest, enabling him to complete a three-month exodus, via Turkey, to Palestine.