With spare prose and in stark images, Joseph Freeman recounts his suffering during the Holocaust from the German invasion of Poland to the liberation of Europe by the Allies. Freeman's narrative includes sober accounts of Nazi atrocities, aching portraits of the noble spirits and unsung heroes who were counted among the walking dead of the concentration camps, and the profoundly moving story of the unexpected reunion of Freeman and the American G.I. who had lifted Freeman's dying body from the mire of a battlefield 40 years earlier.

Both poignant and exquisite in its simplicity, Joseph Freeman's autobiography is at once a shibboleth for those who also endured the unspeakable and a haunting warning for those of us living in these latter days, when the voices of deniers and revisionists of the Holocaust wait to take the place of the aging witnesses who grow weary of their vigil.