Cover of The Last Son’s Promise by Tzachi Tarno: a mother and her son walking together through a snowy forest
A WW2 Historical Novel

The Last Son’s Promise

A mother’s final plea.
A boy’s reason to survive.

Based on the recorded testimony of a Jewish Holocaust survivor from the USC Shoah Foundation archive.

By Tzachi Tarno

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The Story

Romania, 1941.

Thirteen-year-old Max Tarnauceanu was always a bit of a spoiled child, living an idyllic childhood in the small town of Noua Suliță. But his world is completely shattered when the Nazis rise to power in Germany. First, his father is taken by the police, never to be seen again. Left to fend for themselves, Max, his mother, Paulina, brother Asher, and sister Tutza are forced into a death march through the frozen winter.

Desperate to save her children, Paulina seizes a fleeting chance to escape. Together, they flee to the nearest ghetto, taking shelter in the attic of an abandoned building. But with little food and warmth to sustain them, death inches closer every day. And when Asher and Paulina start to show signs of typhus, Max is left with one final plea: as the last Tarnauceanu, he must survive at all costs and never forget what has happened to his family.

Burdened with protecting his sister in a world determined to destroy them, young Max must find courage far beyond his years. But how can a boy endure unimaginable loss and still hold on to hope?

Poignant and deeply moving, The Last Son’s Promise is a powerful story of resilience, sacrifice, and the unbreakable bonds of family, based on the recorded testimony of a Jewish Holocaust survivor from the USC Shoah Foundation archive.

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Behind the Book

The silence that came first

“I never told my children what I went through.” — Meir Tarno, to the doctors at his hospital bed

Those were the words Meir Tarno spoke to the doctors standing over the hospital bed he would never leave, aiming them at the ears of the son in the room. “These are things that cannot be described and cannot be understood.”

It was the first time Tzachi Tarno had heard his father mention what he had lived through in the early 1940s. A few months after his father’s life ended, Tzachi traveled to Romania, to know the man his father had been before he wrapped himself in silence.

There, on the walls of the theater museum in the city of Iași, in a small photograph, he found him: Max Tarnauceanu, whose life the war had torn away, and who rebuilt it on the stage, becoming a celebrated theater star.

Back home, among yellowed documents and photographs, he found an old video cassette, labeled in handwriting:

Tarnauceanu Max · Hadera, July 1998

His father’s testimony for Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust testimony project.

He sat alone, a grown son watching his father give himself over to the work of speaking, to the details of a memory that a whole lifetime of silence had kept shut. When the tape reached its end, this book was born.

Tzachi Tarno, author of The Last Son’s Promise
About the Author

Tzachi Tarno

Tzachi Tarno is a project manager based in Haifa, Israel. A father, grandfather, and life partner, he devoted several years to an extraordinary personal and historical undertaking: documenting the Holocaust survival story of his father, Meir Tarno (Max Tarnauceanu), who survived the war as a young child.

After a remarkable discovery revealed previously unknown details about his father’s past—years after his death—Tzachi embarked on an extensive journey of historical research. That journey reopened a story that had remained buried in silence for decades.

“The Last Son’s Promise” was born from his desire to understand that silence, give voice to memory, and preserve the extraordinary story of one child’s survival—a story that continues to unfold long after the end of the Second World War.

Get the Book

A boy made a promise.
This is the story of how he kept it.

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Also available in Hebrew: טרנוצ׳אנו – הקול שלא דיבר