This is the memoir of Yitzhak Erlichson, writing under the name Jerzy Edison, a Polish Jew who was nineteen years old when he escaped the Nazis by fleeing toward the USSR from his hometown, Wierzbnik. There he hoped to find a land true to its official ideals of justice, equality, and brotherhood. Arrested as an English spy, he was sent to prisons and slave-labor camps, and after his release worked and traveled in the USSR. To his dismay, he found there injustice, inequality, and anti-Semitism equal to that of his native Poland. Attempting to join the Polish army forming in the USSR, he was told it was "only for Poles." After the war, and after he met and married his wife, Fania, and they return to Wierzbnik together. There he learns that none of his family survived the German occupation. This fascinating story sheds new light on the realities of life in the USSR during the Second World War.