Ida Fink uses vivid langauge and impectable details to bring faces to the Holcaust. She tells haunting stories about Jewish life in Poland before and after World War II. Fink's stories are beutifully told and evoke every emotion; from fear to joy, hatred to pity. The book tells about individuals and gives faces and lives to the often impresonal Holocaust.

A Scrap of Time is a collection of short stories that masterfully presents the Holocaust experience from the perspective of survivors, witnesses, and victims in the villages of occupied Poland. Acts of personal courage, the day to day decisions that meant life or death, personal attempts to carry on with dignity, are all expressed here in powerful language and moving tales that evoke the Holocaust as it is not often told: as an experience that was as personal as each person who lived it. I have read and re-read this book several times. Each time, the stories seem to resound with their original power. Ida Fink, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust, is a master storyteller. With the very first sentence, she has the ability to create scenes of astonishing clarity and suspense. You simply cannot put the book down until you finish the story. With simple, lyrical language, she creates scenes of tremendous emotional impact. I don't believe I will ever look at the Holocaust in quite the same way. No television documentary could ever do justice to the Holocaust experience as these unforgettable stories of the personal lives of human beings in the most impossible of situations.

This book is full of life and adventures. It is a wonderful odyssey. It shows the horror of the Holocaust through a remarkable tale of two corageous sisters on the run from the Nazis. They keep their spirits high. They fight to live the little bit of life that they are aloud to have. They are determined to win the battle. The girls change their names and are sent away to Poland by their father. They use false papers and have a false story, that is they say they want to leave voluntarily. Their secret had been found out, but they kept strong and stubborn. They wouldn't let thierselves be beat. They held their heads up high and fought. They believed that, "It will work out somehow." This is what the oldest of the two had to keep reminding her scared younger sister. She would always say this "superstitiously cautious". Although on the outside things looked bad, they believed in their hearts that this statement really was true.