A deeply affecting novel about the Holocaust and the children whose lives were caught up in it. Aron is a beguiling and perceptive and not always happy young boy coming into awareness of himself and his family's struggles. When they are driven from the countryside into Warsaw, their lives are changed forever. Aron and others risk their lives scuttling around the ghetto, smuggling and trading things to keep their people alive, while they are hunted by blackmailers and Jewish, Polish and German police, as gradually things catastrophically worsen, people begin to disappear, and survival is threatened on all sides.