Have you ever stood next to people who live on the other side of Nalibok, that place where Jews aren’t welcome? Did you notice how they subtly took a step away from you? How their eyes glance at you with barely disguised suspicion?
This is the story of what happens when the lives of four people—two brothers, the wife of one of them, and their truest friend—are uprooted by the insanity and hatred of the Holocaust. It is fiction based on fact; a journey Homeric in nature, an odyssey of their travels and trials as they seek to survive the demonic Nazi scourge. But it is not a dark tale; quite the contrary, it is a story of courage, resilience, ingenuity, defiance, and a relentlessly optimistic belief in the human ability to overcome staggering odds. That the characters are based on real people and real events begs description; it makes their survival nothing less than miraculous.
A character in the book, Oren Paweek, says, “Sometimes faith alone isn’t enough. Sometimes faith needs a little help.” And that is precisely what these characters must do to escape the Nazis, elude Poland’s brutish Blue Police, and stave off prevalent anti-Semitism. They craftily and cunningly escape work camps and jailhouses and ghettos and finally seek refuge in the protective, albeit dangerous, world of the Polish forests.
Brothers Uri and Gidon, Uri’s wife, Devorah, and their best friend, Oren, are born in the Jewish section of the small Polish/Belorussian village of Nalibok, and this is where they live quiet, traditional lives like those who lived there for some three hundred years before them. That is, until the advent of the late 1930’s, Hitler’s rise to power, and the German invasion of their country. It is at this crucial moment that they are forced to deal with the very real terror of a world turned horrifically and inexplicably askew. While, at first, they think only of self-preservation, their story gradually evolves into something much larger; it becomes a refusal to submit to the forces that would tear humankind to shreds.