The author did an enor­mous amount of research to uncov­er the bits and pieces of infor­ma­tion that he then wove togeth­er into a whole; and it took his very cre­ative imag­i­na­tion to describe the sit­u­a­tions in which the char­ac­ters, both Ger­man, Pol­ish, and suf­fer­ing Jews found them­selves. Much is based upon the Stroop Report, includ­ing the pho­tographs found in it, although this is only the Nazi point of view. It remained to Porat to describe the sheer fright and agony of the Jew­ish vic­tims — part­ly from his exten­sive research and part­ly from his pro­jec­tion of what it must have been like, felt like, and the awful con­se­quences. A painful book to read, more painful than a mem­oir, because the author uses the tools of descrip­tion and sup­po­si­tion that are usu­al­ly absent from mem­oirs, to encour­age the read­er to respond with emo­tion, as well as intel­lect. It is not about who the boy was, or is, or if he died or sur­vived to become a promi­nent New York physi­cian. It is about how eas­i­ly anti-Semi­tism and pro­pa­gan­da can cre­ate mon­sters out of first, the ​“losers” of soci­ety and then the ordi­nary peo­ple; and the hor­ror of what the Jew­ish peo­ple had to endure. Glos­sary, index.