After losing her parents and brothers, Lusia Schwarzwald, a teenager in Lvov, Poland, joined the Polish underground, assuming false identity to avoid Nazi persecution. Stephen Hornstein and Paul Ornstein, close family friends in Hajdunanas, Hungary, endured the cruelty and near-starvation of forced labor and the terror of life on the run. Anna Brunn, Paul's girlfriend from a small Hungarian village, helped her mother survive the terrors of Auschwitz after the rest of her family had been murdered.

During the early postwar years as medical students in Heidelberg, these determined friends identified their goals, made their plans, and vowed to share the rest of their lives together. They eventually arrived penniless in the United States with only their medical degrees and their hopes for the future.

Jean M. Peck weaves together a compelling narrative out of the richly textured stories and memories of these four doctors, all of whom went on to make important contributions to their fields. Their stirring accounts of the darkest times in Jewish history stand as testimony to the resilience of the human heart and spirit.