With deceptively simple, straight-forward prose, Ilona Flutsztejn-Gruda recounts her experiences coming of age during World War II. The daughter of secular Polish Jews, Ilona and her family fled east at the onset of the conflict, eventually finding themselves in Uzbekistan, where they settled for the duration of the war.

This book reminded me in many ways of Esther Hautzig's memoir of her family's wartime deportation to Siberia, The Endless Steppe, which I read as an adolescent. Like Hautzig, Ilona and her family struggle to find food and shelter in strange places, enduring hunger and cold, confronting prejudice, but also encountering help and community. Although the suffering recounted is real, and very acute, the reader is always aware that by removing themselves (or being removed, as the case may be) from areas of Nazi dominance, a far more terrible fate has been averted.

Perhaps it is unjust, but this creates a sense, almost of relief, in the reader, that this particular family didn't find itself passing through the gates of Auschwitz, or some similar place of horrors. However that may be, this was a fascinating story in its own right, and sadly, in a world with so many refugees, it could not be more topical. ( )