Journalist Julie Masis visits her grandfather Shlomo in a nursing home north of Boston where he is the oldest resident.
He is also a Holocaust survivor and a Red Army veteran with a lifetime of stories he has never fully told - until now.
Grandpa talks about his life in Zgurita, Moldova and about how he survived the war in the Obodovka ghetto, which was in the Romanian-occupied region of Ukraine, known as Transnistria. During the first terrible winter, nearly half of the people in the ghetto died from starvation and disease. Grandpa's two brothers and his father were among the dead. But grandpa survived - even though he could have been killed so many times!
He does not dwell on the terrible things he lived through, but rather on the good memories: the people who helped, the lucky coincidences that saved him. It was curiosity that kept him going, he says one day: He wanted to live to find out who would win.
After being liberated from the ghetto in the spring of 1944, grandpa was drafted into the Red Army. His unit liberated Prague, and grandpa received two medals for bravery. Still, while he shares many stories about the Obodovka ghetto, grandpa says almost nothing about his military service.
The book includes stories about how Ukrainians in Obodovka helped the Jews. And there is also a family legend about a German medic who saved the author's grandmother.
The book is appropriate for middle school students as well as older children and adults.
Illustrated by the late Soviet artist Felix Lembersky.
