Award-winning and Amazon #1 bestselling author Jack Sacco (ND ’78) will share the story of his father, Joe C. Sacco, an American soldier who landed at Omaha Beach, fought in the Battle of the Bulge under the command of General George Patton, and liberated the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.
Louis M. Nanni, vice president for University Relations at the University of Notre Dame, will offer the introduction.
The lecture is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow.
About the Speaker
Jack Sacco was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and educated at the University of Notre Dame, where he earned a degree in engineering.
He is the author of "Where the Birds Never Sing," "Above the Treetops," "The Resurrection Sequence," and "In Sheep's Clothing."
He is the winner of the Alabama Library Association's 2005 Nonfiction Award for "Where the Birds Never Sing." Past winners include Harper Lee for "To Kill a Mockingbird" and Walker Percy for "The Second Coming." In addition, scholars of the Holocaust have also been enthusiastic in their praise. "Where the Birds Never Sing" has been endorsed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
About "Where the Birds Never Sing"
In this riveting book, Jack Sacco tells the realistic, harrowing, at times horrifying, and ultimately triumphant tale of an American GI in World War II as seen through the eyes of his father, Joe Sacco — a farm boy from Alabama who was flung into the chaos of Normandy and survived the terrors of the Bulge.
As part of the 92nd Signal Battalion and Patton's famed Third Army, Joe and his buddies found themselves at the forefront of the Allied push through France and Germany. After more than a year of fighting, but still only twenty years old, Joe had become a hardened veteran. Yet nothing could have prepared him and his unit for the horrors behind the walls of Germany's infamous Dachau concentration camp. They were among the first 250 American troops into the camp, and it was there that they finally grasped the significance of the Allied mission. Surrounded by death and destruction, the men not only found the courage and will to fight, but they also discovered the meaning of friendship and came to understand the value and fragility of life.