Edward Stankiewicz begins by describing his life in prewar Warsaw--his schooling, early love of Latin, and graduation from his gymnasium in 1939 shortly before the German invasion--and his escape to the Soviet-occupied zone. In Lwow (Lemberg) where he attended the university as a student of classics, he began writing Yiddish poems and joined the Writers' Club where he met other Jewish and Polish writers.

After the Germans occupied Lwow, he was forced to work in a factory that provided the German army with leather and pelts. Later, in a German uniform, he fled to the Ukraine where he wandered from town to town for several months until he was captured by the Gestapo, beaten, and sent to Buchenwald.

There, as a Pole hiding his Jewish identity, he ended up working as a scribe in the block for sick and dying prisoners. He also managed to continue writing poems, some of which are reproduced in this book.

As hellish as Buchenwald was, the fact that its political prisoners had for the most part wrested control of its inner workings from the camp's criminal prisoners, meant that there was something of a buffer between the prisoners and the SS in charge of the camp. This situation allowed the prisoners to exact their own justice. Twice Stankiewicz saw prisoners kill other prisoners who had been kapos at other camps ("Buchenwald was meting out justice the prisoners' way."). Toward the end of the book the author describes the day--April 11, 1945--the camp was liberated by the Americans.

The author's passion for poetry and language runs like a thread through the entire book (he is professor emeritus of Slavic linguistics and literary theory at Yale University). His memoir is an important source of new information and insights about previously little known aspects of wartime Eastern European intellectual life, as well as a moving story of survival against incredible odds.