Based on the true story of Martin Schiller, a child survivor of the Holocaust, this gripping memoir describes the unfolding horror of the Nazi genocide seen through the eyes of a child. "Menek" (Schiller's childhood nickname) was six-years-old when the Nazis invaded Poland, and his family fled eastward from their native Tarnobrzeg. He was nine when he and his family were interned as slave laborers at the Skarzysko concentration camp, where his father perished. As the Russian army advanced, Menek and his brother were deported to Buchenwald, where Menek survived with the help of a sympathetic Block Elder (a German political prisoner) who placed him in a barrack for Russian POWs.

The story of his journey continues after liberation, with their harrowing escape from postwar Poland; the brothers' travels through war-ravaged Germany to find their mother; and the anxiety of the DP camps where the family must decide between Israel or America. This memoir covers the now-emblematic features of a survivor's journey both during and after the war with the intimacy of a young boy's point-of-view, recalling his own thoughts and reactions to events as he tries to make sense of an irrational world.