This is a gripping, vivid memoir of suffering, loss, initiative, and lonely survival in a ghetto, camps, and death marches during the Holocaust. Leon Frim was a lawyer in Przemysl, Poland and a talented artist, a skill that saved his and his son Karol's lives repeatedly. Throughout his rich, compelling account from loss of freedom under Soviet occupation, to hell under the Germans, we keenly sense Leon Frim's desperate efforts to save his family. We follow his struggle through the Przemysl ghetto and three Nazi murder operations. We feel his loss when his wife Dora disappears after fleeing to hide with a friend in Lwow. We feel his pain through a long series of camps, a murderous death march, and the final internment in Buchenwald, where his son Karol died shortly before liberation. And as we read, Leon Frim opens a window onto Jewish – non-Jewish relations and the willingness or unwillingness of non-Jewish friends and acquaintances to shield them from the Nazis. And Frim's powerful description of Buchenwald, down to the marker he designed for his son's last resting place there, leaves an indelible mark on the reader.
