Shlomo Waks and his family were routed from their home in Krasnik (Poland) by SS troops and taken to the local railroad station for deportation to Belzec, a newly functioning extermination camp in eastern Poland. As the doors rolled shut on the cattle wagon, his mother pushed him from the car and ordered him to go home. She and the others vanished with the train and Shlomo returned alone to their house, which was already being looted by Polish neighbors. He was seven years old. The narrative is not exclusively a "Holocaust story" but the story of a whole life lived through a pattern of optimism and resourcefulness in the flux of adversity