This epic book is born of the author's desire to tell something of the lives and deaths of fellow Jews in Poland under German occupation. It is both a genuine historical study, supported by many years of research and a first-hand account, the author having himself witnessed many of the events he describes.

This study is, however, unconventionally written as a story; only history as fiction can hope to convey man's helplessness and his struggles; his humiliation and his heroism; the conflicts between his duty and defiance; his solitude amongst buzzing crowds; his fight against loss of humanity and his hope even in the throes of death.

Even some of the most serious issues of the time: theories of race and the causes of war, Allied attitudes and relations between free and captive Jews and the historical and religious meaning of what has become inaptly known as the holocaust are discussed in a conversational style, generating in effect a story which is 'at once mysterious and plain, fiction and fact'. But whatever the outward form, the text is always truthful to deed and fact.