Alexander Rucki is the child of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and his book is both a reminder of man's breathtaking inhumanity to man and the absolute miracle of survival. These long-term effects are seen in hindsight over sixty years later. One can only begin to imagine what it would've been like to be sixteen and the sole survivor of a Nazi death camp. It's been done before-Diary of Anne Frank and Schindler's List among the two most popular-but this tragedy is constantly revisited, and I suspect this story is now ripe for the retelling. Alexander's mother not only survived Auschwitz-her brother, sister; and parents did not-but she married, bore two sons, and moved to a new continent with a new language, far away from the hell of Europe.