[3] American book review magazine Kirkus Reviews said "each brief story is crystallized around moments when quietly ordinary people, living secure and ordered existences, enter nightmare" and praised Fink for telling "poignant, wrenching tales, told with skill and unwavering focus".

[4] Thomas Klein wrote in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 12, that the collection of stories "offer a haunting, uncompromising view of lives that have been disrupted and terminated".

He also notes that the short stories "include no crematoria, no selections, and no merciless views of life in the camps, but their absence does not mitigate the sadness, futility, and the omnipresent 'why'."

He concludes that Fink's writing offers "spare, quiet stories that disturb in a far more upsetting way", and that "they threaten our very beliefs in an essential human dignity and innocence".

He singles out the short The Shelter as "a classically constructed horror story that is one of the best examples of the genre" [Holocaust], that he has ever read.