In this book, not­ed author and teller of Jew­ish tales, Hanoch Teller sets out the expe­ri­ences of nine Jew­ish chil­dren who sur­vived the Holo­caust in dif­fer­ent parts of Europe, imbu­ing each sto­ry with a larg­er mes­sage of faith or under­stand­ing or stead­fast courage as each indi­vid­ual pro­tag­o­nist faces his or her own set of chal­lenges and uses spe­cial traits to emerge whole on the oth­er side.

A young boy named Michael whose father had fore­seen a future too many could not acknowl­edge and did not turn away from what he saw; a tal­ent­ed vio­lin­ist named Cecil­ia whose gift for music put her into greater dan­ger but also helped keep her safe; four­teen-year-old Srulek who under­stood the val­ue of resis­tance in all its many faces and forms; Dol­ly, an infant hid­den for months in a trash recep­ta­cle in a con­cen­tra­tion camp…these chil­dren and oth­ers are shown as sym­bols of renew­al, of a spir­it that can­not be defeat­ed and of sparks of Jew­ish hope. Above all, they are shown as real peo­ple who went on to have lives beyond the hor­rors of the Holo­caust in spite of what they endured.

Pho­tographs of the chil­dren from the times of their Euro­pean child­hoods to the times of their present day lives with an empha­sis on their cur­rent fam­i­lies and new gen­er­a­tions are includ­ed as are sev­er­al intro­duc­to­ry essays pre­sent­ed as fore­words and pref­aces and an author’s note. A glos­sary, bib­li­og­ra­phy, and index are append­ed. Rec­om­mend­ed for ages 12 and up.