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This vividly detailed memoir describes the author’s experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust who narrowly escaped death by living a childhood of constant vigil and, along with his family, continuously dodging the ever-present threat of a Nazi capture. Intended to illustrate the fate of not just the Bergman family but more broadly the Polish Jewry and its surviving remnant, the memoir begins with a brief foray into the history of Jewish life in Poland, detailing the complicated relationship that developed between Poland and its Jewish population. This section details the author’s early life in Poznan, a northwestern Polish city where the Bergmans were one of only a few Jewish families among a larger population of Poles and Prussians. After the Nazi invasion of Poland, Poznan became an increasingly dangerous city in which to live, as evidenced by the author’s account of being struck deaf by the butt of a German officer’s rifle while playing in the street with other children. Though traumatic and certainly life-threatening, this vicious attack would also ultimately save his life several times, including once when an assailant fired several shots at his retreating form only to relent upon realizing that his shots could not be heard. The story continues with equally vivid accounts of the family’s narrow escapes to (and from) the Lodz, Warsaw, and Czestochowa ghettos, describing some of the more horrific vignettes of life in the Jewish ghetto and detailing how the family barely survived through a fortuitous combination of luck, skilled deception, and an underlying will to live.
