When World War II erupted in Europe, Konrad Charmatz was a prospering businessman in Sosnowiec, Poland, a loving son, and an aspiring poet. For the next seven years he witnessed the Holocaust as it destroyed his family, his country, and his culture. In this astonishing story of suffering and survival, he gives his own personal account of the Warsaw ghetto, the death chambers at Auschwitz, the transport trains, the slave labor camps of Dachau, and the liberation. And from the perspective of the renowned journalist he later became, he also describes how the Holocaust was carried out, not only at the level of governments and their armies, but at the level of the individuals who took its orders. Few people survived the Holocaust from such close range or for so long, and few remembered it with the eye of a practiced journalist.

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Konrad Charmatz, a Yiddish newspaper editor after the war, was awarded the 1985 literary prize of the World Federation of Jewish Partisans and Holocaust Survivors for this book.

Charmatz's years of horror were spent in the Warsaw ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and the slave labor camps of Dachau. The author, born in Poland in 1910, describes how the Jews were crowded together in the ghetto, living in filth with almost nothing to eat, and the constant fear of being deported to the death camps. . . . It is an exceptional work, recounting in vivid detail the madness of the Holocaust in all its cruelty, violence, and inhumanity.

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