Yanek Gruener is a ten-year-old boy living in Kraków, Poland in 1939 when Adolf Hitler invades, at the beginning of World War II.

When Yanek was thirteen years old, he and his uncle were taken to the Plaszow Concentration Camp, where they worked in the tailor shops making uniforms for the German soldiers and fellow prisoners.

After the death of his uncle, he was employed through the concentration camp to work in an enamelware factory by a man named Oskar Schindler.

There, due to their poor health and weak bodies, the Nazi official ordered all the Jewish prisoners not to work for a week and instead eat and regain their strength.

After surviving the witch of Buchenwald, Yanek was once again placed in a cattle car and sent to Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp, where he lost a button on his jacket and got more than 20 lashes before he was sent on his second death march.

"[4] Publishers Weekly wrote that Gratz's "determination to be exhaustively inclusive, along with lapses into History Channel–like prose, threatens to overwhelm the story.

"[5] Debra Gold, writing for the Jewish Book Council noted, "The language, sparse yet provocative, draws the reader in and, like Night by Elie Wiesel, poignantly shows the darkness of the Holocaust with always the possibility of hope and survival.