Charles Roland has written a readable, compassionate account of the relentlessly depressing and yet heroic history of the Warsaw ghetto. While he describes the totality of life in the ghetto, this book focuses on the medical disaster, the hunger, disease and psychological devastation, which heretofore has received slight attention from historians. Roland, a trained physician and historian, tells the story of the creation and operation, against German edict and incredible odds, of a medical school in the Warsaw ghetto. Meeting secretly in the evenings for lectures and learning clinical medicine in the ghetto's crowded, makeshift hospitals, as many as 500 students may have obtained some medical education during the school's brief, clandestine existence (1941-1942). Doctors were scarce in the ghetto, disease widespread. But aside from these pressing practical reasons for training doctors, the school's very existence was a singular attempt to express resistance and to maintain normalcy, however self-delusive, in the face of adversity.