On 15th September 1939 the Orenstein family of Hrubieszow, Poland, joined the stream of refugees fleeing the German army. For the next six years the lives of this once-prosperous Jewish family were to be an almost inconceivable nightmare of cramped waterless hideouts, betrayals by their Polish neighbours, beatings, concentration camps, brutal forced marches, and finally, for some, murder. Their story is movingly told by Henry, the youngest son, who survived the war through intelligence, luck, bravery, and determination to live. As well as the ordeals and horrors of the holocaust he also describes his life in pre-war Poland: the satisfactions of academic success, thrashing the school bully, and his mother's cooking, as well as the indignities of assaults, taunts, and Jewish quotas in schools, and the ever-present fear of pogroms.