Georg Rauch was born in Salzburg, Austria on Valentine's Day 1924. Because of his Jewish blood, he was treated as a second class citizen, and ignored by his teachers at school. He spent his youth helping his mother to feed and care for the Jews she was hiding in their Viennese attic. He also taught himself Morse code, to cook, to build radios and to play the harmonica. All of these would come in very handy when he was sent as a foot soldier and telegraphist to the Russian Front during WWII. His memoir, The Jew with the Iron Cross, is based on his experiences as a Jewish soldier in Hitler's army and as a prisoner of the Russians. The inspiration for the book are the 80 plus letters he wrote to his mother from the Russian trenches. Following the war Rauch spent 1 1/2 years in an alpine TB sanatorium after it was discovered he had contracted TB while a prisoner of war. Rauch had drawn and painted from childhood,and after leaving the TB hospital, he began to dedicate himself professionally to what he had always loved best - painting. He was supported by grants from the Austrian government and had numerous one man shows in the European capitols. After meeting his wife, Phyllis, he moved to the United States in 1966 and continued to exhbit in New York, California, and Toronto. After a first trip to Mexico in 1967, Rauch exhibited regularly in Puerto Vallarta Mexico. In 1976 Georg and Phyllis moved permanently to Mexico where Georg continued to show all over the country and was honored with various large museum retrospectives. Georg's memoir was published in the summer of 2006 and he died in November of the same year. The Jew with the Iron Cross has been translated into Spanish and won a prize for life stories awarded by Writer's Digest magazine in 2007.
