The Bauer family lived in Buczacz, a beautiful, resort-like town in a mountainous area of what was then Poland -- now part of Ukraine. Etunia and her twin brother were born in 1922 to a Polish Jewish couple; an elder sister and a younger set of twins completed the close-knit family. The family leased and farmed a country estate of 800 acres that offered the children a life of "pastoral contentment and peace".

By the late 1930s, storm clouds were gathering over this seemingly over this seemingly idyllic existence. Anti-Semitism, always present in Poland and the neighboring Ukraine, intensified to the point where, in 1937, the Jews of Buczacz found it necessary to form their own secondary school.

On a sunny day in July 1941, German soldiers entered Buczacz, spreading a pall of fear. Within a week, savagery reigned as Ukrainian anti-Semites made common cause with the Nazis, beating, robbing, and killing Jews. By the end of August, the dreaded Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators had begun their grisly work. The author's twin brother fell victim to the first of these massacres. Her younger brothers were rounded up for transport to a labor camp, but their father, using bribery and personal connections, managed to free them.

Some three and a half years of harrowing existence followed. Deprivation and terror were constant companions as the Bauer family struggled to survive, at times hiding in barns,chicken coops, and open fields, dependent on the assistance -- sometimes freely given, but often at a price -- of Polish and Ukrainian neighbors, business associates, former employees, and strangers. Finally, brutal violence overtook the Bauer family. The author, by the slenderest margin of fortune, survived. Her riveting story graphically recalls one of the darkest chapters in modern history as experienced by a spirited young woman.

This book is a chronicle of family love and devotion in the face of massive evil, violence, and death, and of scattered points of light in a world of darkness. That devotion, and that light, gave Etunia Bauer Katz the chance to survive.