As a boy, Joe Rosenblum watches as the Nazi overlords tighten their grip on his small Polish town. Narrowly escaping mass executions which take his own brother, Rosenblum is first sheltered by a local Gentile family, then takes refuge with Russian partisans. Once captured by the Germans, he begins a journey through three concentration camps -- Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Dachau.

As a member of the Resistance in Auschwitz, Rosenblum helps to dynamite the crematoria, acts as a courier to get messages out of the camp, and is able to save children "selected" for the gas chambers. Eventually he finds himself working for the infamous Dr. Mengele. In a bizarre twist of fate, the "Angel of Death" is persuaded to perform life-saving surgery on Rosenblum -- perhaps making him the only Jew to be saved by the deadly doctor's skills.

A remarkable man who danced on the razor's edge of history, Rosenblum did not merely survive the Holocaust, but rose above it by radiating hope and humanity -- by defying the darkness.