At the age of nine Janina David was leading a sheltered life with her prosperous Jewish family in Poland. One year later they were all facing starvation in the Warsaw ghetto. In her memoirs of a wartime childhood Janina David describes the family's struggle against insurmountable odds.
When it became clear that none of them was likely to survive, the thirteen-year-old girl was smuggled out of the ghetto to live with family friends - a Polish woman and her German-born husband. When their home became too dangerous, she was sent with false identity papers to a Catholic convent, where she lived in constant fear of being discovered.