This is a book that distils the brutality of the Holocaust into the experiences of a real-life individual. It is the story of Miklos Hammer, a Hungarian Jew, and his fight to survive his conscription into the Hungarian Jewish forced labour Battalion in 1944, his life in a Jewish ghetto, and his eventual sufferings in Birkenau. The nightmare train journeys, the work, the casual death and torture, and the awful routine of existence inside the camps are all recounted. The book describes how a chance meeting with an Englishman led Hammer into a new and unexpected form of oppression.