The memoirs of the Polish-Jewish writer, physician, and humanitarian aid activist, Alina Margolis-Edelman (1922–2008), present the life of its author from her childhood in .ód., Poland till the end of the World War II. Soon after the beginning of the war her father was shot by the Gestapo, and her mother moved to Warsaw Ghetto with Alina and her younger brother. Alina enrolled in the Jewish School of Nursing and worked as a nurse and a courier for the Resistance movement. In a rescue action she describes in the book, she saved the life of Marek Edelman – one of the leaders of the Ghetto Uprising (1943), and he later became her husband.
The stories told in her book illuminate issues of anti-Semitism, Holocaust, and Jewish resistance to oppression. She writes about solidarity in times of great danger, resilience in dire situations, dignity of love and care.

Alina Margolis-Edelman (1922–2008) was a Polish physician, Holocaust survivor, and resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Forced to flee Poland in 1968 amid rising antisemitism, she went on to join Doctors Without Borders and co-found Doctors of the World, taking part in humanitarian medical missions across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.Ludmila Melchior-Yahil is a political scientist, author, editor and translatorIrena Grudzinska-Gross fleed her native Poland in 1968, obtained her PhD at the Columbia University and became a professor at Emory University and Boston University, as well as a research scholar at Princeton University. She has written historical books on modern Europe (particularly intellectual history and literature), including The Scar of Revolution (1991), Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (2009), and Golden Harvest (2011), the latter of which she co-wrote with Jan T. Gross.

Editor’s Preface by Irena Grudzi.ska-Gross
Introduction by Marci Shore
Before the War
War
The Ghetto
On the Aryan Side
Luba’s Story
The Uprising
Epilogue