In 1940, ten-year-old Boruch Frusz­ta­jer and his par­ents were packed into cat­tle cars with oth­er Pol­ish Jews and sent to Siberia. They end­ed up in a desert­ed min­ing set­tle­ment where they had to fig­ure out how to sur­vive the bit­ter cold, the gru­el­ing work details, and the mea­ger rations. When the Ger­man-Sovi­et alliance end­ed, these gulag sur­vivors were reset­tled in near­by towns, to be repa­tri­at­ed to Poland after the war. Com­mu­nist Poland had lit­tle to offer, so Boruch’s father arranged for him to study engi­neer­ing in Eng­land. Frusz­ta­jer then moved to Amer­i­ca, where he start­ed a series of suc­cess­ful semi­con­duc­tor firms. While Frusz­ta­jer may have need­ed to close his auto­bi­og­ra­phy with an account of his busi­ness career, details of merg­er talks and union dis­putes just can’t com­pete with sto­ries of bar­ter­ing illic­it­ly panned gold for food, or haul­ing tim­ber through dead­ly snow­drifts in the gulag.