When the Nazis invade Krakow, Poland, in 1939, things soon go from bad to worse for Yanek's Jewish family. First, Yanek and the other Jewish kids are forbidden from attending school, and his father's shop is forced to close. Then their neighborhood is turned into a ghetto, where everyone lives in fear of the Nazis coming and taking them away. After losing everyone he loves, Yanek himself is captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp.

There, Yanek struggles to avoid being noticed by the camp's sadistic commandant, who takes great pleasure in shooting prisoners at random. Over the course of the next six years, Yanek is sent to one nightmarish camp after another—ten camps in all, including Birkenau and Auschwitz. He survives a brutal death march, starvation, and torture as countless others are sent to their deaths around him.

All he knows is that he must survive…at any cost. But can he do that without losing his hope, his will—and most of all his sense of who he really is inside?