Kolbuszowa is gone now. Before World War II it was a thriving, small Polish town of 4,000 people, half Polish Catholics, half Jews, where family and the traditional ways of life were strong. It was the town where Norman Salsitz was born, in 1920, the last of nine children. It was the town that he helped to destroy, forced by the Nazis in 1941 to assist in the brick-by-brick destruction of the Jewish ghetto in which his family lived. Salsitz was subsequently sent to a German work camp, but escaped into the woods to live and later tell his story of Kolbuszowa to Richard Skolnik. Salsitz speaks to us both as an exceptional witness to everyday events in the town and as a shrewd observer of the broader landscape. Colorful details bring the people, the customs, and habits, both religious and secular, back to life.

Compelling recollections of a Jewish boy in a prewar Polish village, of his incredible scramble to survive the Holocaust, and of his adventures in America.

Told with the inimitable flair of a born storyteller, these stories recall the lost world of small-town Polish Jewry before the Holocaust and the subsequent odyssey of one boy's struggle to stay alive in the face of catastrophe. Brimming with the authenticity and humanity of personal experience, these memoirs are at once persuasive, moving, and universal in appeal.

Packed with rarely divulged details of daily life during the Holocaust, the book provides significant insights into human nature and the roles played by chance and purpose in staying alive. It is a route of dizzying change. First, author Salsitz, an orthodox Jew, becomes a slave laborer. Then he becomes an escapee, then a partisan. In the ultimate irony, he passes as a non-Jew, working in Polish security after the war. In America, Salsitz finds that the very traits that saw him through the war enabled him to prosper in his adopted land.