This vol­ume is part of the Holo­caust Sur­vivors’ Mem­oirs Project inspired by Elie Wiesel. Gene and Mark Elsner, and their cousin, Henek, were forced to flee their home in Nowy Sacz, in south­ern Poland, when the Ger­mans invad­ed. When they reached Lvov, in the Sovi­et zone of Poland, they were arrest­ed and deport­ed to the Gulag where they faced unimag­in­able hard­ship under arc­tic con­di­tions. After Ger­many invad­ed Rus­sia, they were released to join a new Pol­ish army fight­ing the Ger­mans. Their descrip­tion of the odyssey through Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara on the way to join up with the Poles, a jour­ney which took them through the Sovi­et heart­land, allows the read­er to see what life was like there dur­ing wartime. Through it all, the broth­ers schemed and strug­gled to stay togeth­er, using guile and wits. Gene even became a trans­la­tor for the occu­py­ing Ger­man army; of course, they didn’t know he was a Jew. No mat­ter what he wit­nessed, he had to stay focused on keep­ing him­self and his broth­er alive. Not only does this mem­oir pro­vide his­tor­i­cal insight into the Nazi occu­pa­tion of the Cau­ca­sus, it per­son­i­fies the Jew­ish will to resist as Gene made con­tact with the resis­tance and was able to aid them. It is also as much a sto­ry about fam­i­ly and broth­er­hood as it is about the cru­el­ty of two regimes — fas­cist and com­mu­nist. After the war, the two broth­ers set­tled in Israel, side by side. Henek, from whom they had become sep­a­rat­ed, sur­vived, shel­tered by a Pol­ish Chris­t­ian woman whom he lat­er mar­ried. Writ­ten by Gene Elsner’s son Alan, a jour­nal­ist, it reads like an adven­ture story.