“As a child my father provided most of my entertainment. He was an amazing story teller, improviser, musician, performer, poet, illustrator. He would make toys with his own hands. He would write, illustrate and bind original storybooks for us. He would sit at night and tell elaborate stories that would go on for months. Sometimes he would weave songs into the stories and improvise lyrics. He was a one man Pixar or Disney.

As we got older, the stories became less fantasy and more the fantastic memories of his life. More and more he would tell us stories from his experience during World War Two. He told his best stories at Sabbath dinner each Friday night when all of us would sit around the table after dinner. "Pick a year between 1942 and 1946", he would say. So one of the kids would randomly pick a year and he would tell us in the most intimate detail what happened that day, that week and the weeks around that day. It was incredible. His memory recall from his past was phenomenal. He remembered conversations, peoples’ names, strangers’ stories, ancestry, geography, everything. Amazing!

This book is all of those stories from the war written as he remembered originally writing it in diary form. Although he never escaped the war with his actual diary, he had the foresight to memorize all of it just in case. As a teenager I encouraged him to write it all down in english for all of his family to cherish. Many years later I turned it into a book.”

(Limore Shur)