text: The story is both true and extremely unique: The Author, who is an Austrian mountaineer and a SS Nazi officer at the same time,  escapes from a British POW camp in India with the goal to go through Tibet to Japan-occupied Burma, to be sent back to Germany, so as not to miss his chance to participate in WWII.  The extreme difficulties of hiding from officials and surviving the wintry elements of the Himalaya mountains make his Burma plan impossible, so he stays in Tibet.  His unthinkable achievements include storming his way into the "Forbidden City" (Lhassa, the capital), gaining employment in the Tibetian Government, becoming a friend of the "God-King" Dalai Lama - an extremely bright, knowledge-hungry teenager, and learning the Tibetian language to the degree which anable him to do live interpretation for Dalai Lana of English-language movies ("Believe me, it is not easy for a German to translate Shakespearian English into Tibetian"). 
  Going with a yak through the snows of the 20,000-feet Himalayan passes, escaping merciless robbers, manouvering between border guards - make Seven Years in Tibet a great adventure book. However, the insightful and rich observations about Tibetian people, customs, culture and politics, go far beyond  any other available information on that far-away country, and Dalai-Lama's foreword to this book confirms this fact.
  The peaceful and friendly life and culture of Tibet is raped by military annexation of Tibet by China in 1951. The ancient monasteries are destroyed, the Puritan-like culture is replaced by such crude elements of civilization as e.g. brothels for the occupying soldiers,  Dalai Lama twice escapes to India, and so does the Author; one third of the Tibetians die of starvation.
  "Seven Tears ib Tibet" allows us a bitter-seet inside into see a country, that lived the way how countries in medieval times lived; also, the country trampled and largely destroyed by its aggressive neighbour.
  