Imre Rochlitz's book is a memoir of his unique coming of age as a Jewish teenager first in Austria until 1938, and then in Croatia before and during World War II. It manages to combine several books' worth of material in barely two hundred pages. It is simultaneously a Holocaust memoir, a testimony about the Yugoslav Partisan movement from one of its participants, and a lucid reflection on the past by an amateur historian.

The book could be divided into three sections. In the Prologue, which deals with his birth in Budapest in 1925 and childhood in Vienna until the Anschluss, Rochlitz offers wonderfully rich insight into the complex identities developed by his extended family. They were highly acculturated German-speaking Jews who identified with the Austrian nation and the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire over both Germany and Hungary (his father's country of origin); financially poor yet proud members of the German Kulturnation who disdained Yiddish-speaking Jews; and religious at home but seeking to blend in with Austrian Gentiles in public. With eye-opening candor, the author acknowledges that the spread of Nazi propaganda in Austria after 1933 affected his family's self-perception as they drew a distinction between their own perceived Germanness and the Jewishness exhibited by the unassimilated Jews of Eastern Europe.

These distinctions become especially poignant in the chapters dealing with the author's flight from annexed Austria to relatives in Croatia (then still a part of the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and his precarious existence in the German-occupied Independent State of Croatia dominated by the local Fascist movement (Ustaše) after 1941. Rochlitz's account of his arrest and brief imprisonment in the Jasenovac concentration camp recall Primo Levi's account of the deadening psychological effect and quick loss of the norms of civilized life wrought by imprisonment in Auschwitz. By contrast, Rochlitz's experiences after his release from Jasenovac and illegal passage into the Italian zone of occupation on the Dalmatian coast offer nuanced insight into the complex relations between Jewish refugees from all over Central and Southeastern Europe, the Dalmatian Croats who often spoke Italian and adopted Italian culture as their own yet disdained Italian rule, and the almost uniformly polite, socially isolated Italian soldiers and policemen devoid of anti-Semitic prejudice. While these chapters sometimes read as almost too idyllic, after the author's experiences in the German zone of occupation, it is little wonder that he retains overwhelmingly positive memories of life under Italian rule, even during detainment in camps for civilian Jewish refugees.

The last section of the book covers the period between Italy's departure from the war and the war's end. The author fled into the Croatian interior, there fell in with the Communist resistance movement (the Partisans), and served as an apprentice veterinarian. These chapters offer a complex view from the ground up of this unique resistance movement: the interplay between Communist ideology, wartime necessity, and arbitrary violence in bringing new members to the movement and keeping them in line; the effect of many uneducated, ethnic Serbian Partisans' anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism on an educated foreign Jew whose native language was German (though Rochlitz learned fluent Serbo-Croatian soon after arriving in Croatia); and the sheer toughness of the Partisan peasant guerrillas in opposing a far better equipped enemy. Despite the author's quick disenchantment with Communism as practiced by the Partisans and his burning desire (born of a childhood idealization of America) to fight the Nazis and the Ustaše with the U.S. Army, the Partisan chapters nevertheless convey a sense of fulfillment that the author was able to participate, however imperfectly, in the anti-Fascist war effort.

Interspersed with the text are the author's comments about the postwar fates of some of the people mentioned, as well as reproductions of wartime documents he found in various archives, and even a bit of his 1995 interview with Fitzroy Maclean, former head of the Allied Mission to Yugoslavia. More interesting for the professional historian are Rochlitz's thought-provoking and occasionally provocative comments about the survivor's burden of memory, Holocaust research, and the very nature of survival. Though he is adamant that he survived by pure chance, not by courage or wits or the intervention of a higher power, the ambiguous title of the book is reflected in the multiple layers of memory and narrative interpretation it contains.