As the German army invades his hometown in Poland, young Moishe Kantorowitz decides to mentally record everything he sees. In this movingly descriptive and devastating portrayal of prewar Jewish life and its destruction during the Holocaust, Moishe bears witness to incomprehensible cruelties and to the lives and communities that are rapidly wiped out by the Nazis. Moishe's entire family is murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Moishe, selected to live, endures brutal treatment and constant hunger, his survival now dependent on the whims of his overseers and small acts of generosity that bring him back from the brink of death.