Of the hundreds of thousands of children transported to the death camp Auschwitz during Hitler's regime in Germany in World War Two, only fifty two under the age of eight survived. Michael Bornstein was one of the children liberated and became famous around the world when a photograph of him in the arms of his grandmother appeared after being filmed by a Soviet soldier involved in the liberation.
The book begins in 1939, when the Bornsteins were a successful and close Polish family who had already experienced both anti-Semitism and considerable hardship as Hitler came to power in neighboring Germany. When their small town of Zarki is taken over by German soldiers, Michael's father becomes head of the Jewish Council, and bribes the Gestapo to allow hundreds of townspeople to escape, and also bribes Gestapo leaders to offer clemency to others who are going to be executed. Soon the Jewish people were removed from their homes and resettled in a Jewish ghetto, where food was scared and hygiene levels exceptionally low, but within the ghettos familiies remained together and neighbors remained neighbors. For the children, the location was different than they were used to, but their everyday lives, and the familiar faces that surrounded them remained the same.
This changed when the Poles from the ghetto began to be transferred to internment camps. They were moved to other Polish towns, such as Treblinka (where there was also a death camp) and Pionki. Eventually they arrived in Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Bornstein ceases to be Michael, and becomes known as B-1148, a number that in actual fact was recycled by the Nazis, who wanted the death toll numbers to seem lower should their mass extermination of Jewish people and those who opposed their regime be discovered. Another child before him had been B-1148. Michael is separated from his parents and family and given a uniform, but it is too big, an becomes ever bigger because of the lack of food given out at the camp. Bornstein tells of the way in which he and the other children believed wholeheartedly that they would be reunited with their families again in the same way that children believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; children believe in the impossible, because the possible is too horrific for them to contemplate or process.
Michael did not see many of his family members again. His father was killed at Auschwitz. HIs Aunt Ruth was discovered hiding in a Catholic orphanage (many Catholics were sent to Auschwitz as well, religious feeling of any sort deemed a threat by Hitler who felt that the only godlike force in the lives of his citizens should be himself). His father is a brave and selfless man who helps many to escape the ghetto and their fate at the death camp. One bright spot is the survival of Michael's Aunt Hilda, who endures unimaginable hardship in an adjunct camp called Buchenwald, where prisoners were worked to the limits of their capabilities, and in many cases worked to death. Michael also tells of the faceless heroes who risked their own lives in order to help others. One example of this is a Japanese diplomat by the name of Chiune Sugihara, who put his own and his family's lives in danger by issuing visas to Jews so that they could escape to Japan. Michael's own lifesaver and hero was his mother; she hid him in the women's barracks after smuggling him from the children's barracks, and he hid there until the camp was liberated.
After liberation, Michael and other survivors encountered an alarming degree of anti-Semitism that had not died with the final solution, and Hitler himself. Survivors faced an enormous amount of hatred from Polish residents who had seized the homes of Jewish families and were not intending to give them back. Michael and his elderly grandmother experience this first hand; they are not able to move back into their family home and instead take up residence in a chicken coop outside. Having believed his mother to be dead, Michael and his grandmother are eventually reunited with her, but having nowhere to live, are registered as refugees, and displaced persons. The eventually receive visas that enable them to begin a new life in America.
