In 1969, Deb­o­rah Stein­er-Van Rooyen was instruct­ed by her grand­fa­ther to find his brother’s son, Yon­ah Stein­er. All she knew was the name of the Israeli kib­butz he had lived on near­ly two decades ago. Mirac­u­lous­ly, not only does she find her grandfather’s nephew, but she per­suades him to t ell her about his expe­ri­ence dur­ing the Holo­caust, some­thing he had not spo­ken about to his own chil­dren for years. Yonah’s recount­ing of his life from age thir­teen, when he was first cap­tured by the Nazis in Poland on his way home from school and forced into bru­tal slave labor for sev­en years, is heart-wrench­ing. No mat­ter how many accounts one reads on the Holo­caust, each individual’s tes­ti­mo­ny is an edu­ca­tion in what the Jews went through and lived to tell future gen­er­a­tions. Yon­ah is whol­ly hon­est to Stein­er-Van Rooyen, who faith­ful­ly nar­rates his sto­ry, includ­ing his descrip­tion of maim­ing and mur­der­ing the Nazi sol­diers with bay­o­nets upon his lib­er­a­tion, along with his camp cohorts. The words are shock­ing to read, although in truth, no more so than the grit­ty details of camp life or Yonah’s con­stant brush­es with death through­out the war. 

Though he says he has lost the abil­i­ty to cry and feel as acute­ly as those who did not go through the war, Yon­ah is an inspi­ra­tional fig­ure, and his sto­ry is a tes­ta­ment to the endur­ing sur­vival and spir­it of the Jew­ish people.