Roman Halter (1927-2012) was a spirited schoolboy in 1939 when he and his family gathered behind the curtains to watch the Volksdeutsche (German-Polish) neighbors of Chodecz greet Hitler's armies with kisses and swastika flags.

Within days the family home had been seized, 12-year-old Roman had become a slave of the local SS chief, and, returning from an errand, he witnessed his Jewish classmates being bayoneted to death. So began his remarkable six-year journey through some of the darkest caverns of Nazi Europe that claimed the lives of his family and the 800-strong community of his boyhood. Incredibly, he survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, the Stutthof concentration camp, and a slave factory in Dresden, only to find his native village, postwar, was nothing like the home he remembered.