The story covers the most eventful decade of the author's life, 1939-1949. It is told in a collection of contemporaneous "letters forward" to his two small (future) grandchildren. During that time the author grew from childhood to adulthood, survived the Holocaust, traveled and lived in six different countries, and experienced Nazism, Communism and Zionism. On the last day of October 1949 after crossing the Atlantic from Sweden, his dream came true when he stepped ashore at Pier 99, in Manhattan.