As the German tanks advance street by street, destroying the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the few remaining fighters, Yosl Rakover, writes out his last words to God His writings surface in Europe in the 1950s and are acclaimed by Thomas Mann as a religious masterpiece But what is hailed as the greatest testament of the entire Holocaust is in fact a short story, written for a Yiddish newspaper by a remarkable young Jew, Zvi Kolitz The story of what happened to the text and to Zvi Kolitz, and their eventual rejoining, forms the second part of the book