This is the story of an eighteen-year-old boy who left his family and fled his native Vienna to Holland. There, as an illegal refugee, he was imprisoned in the state prison at Veenhuizen, where he wrote a diary relating his experiences in 1938 in Vienna and Holland. The book goes on to tell of his survival during the war working on Dutch farms, acquiring forged documents from the underground, and hiding in Charlotte van Dijk’s home in Utrecht from late 1942 onward.