Structure

This book is broken into three major parts. Part one covers the circumstances under which Irena’s parents met and her early childhood through her time as a prisoner of war in the hospital in Ternopol, and stints in the Russian prison and quarantine camp. This first part ends with Irena being reunited with her family in Radom. It is in the second part of the book, which represents the lion’s share of the text, that Irena details her work with the Jews, including her first act of disobedience by putting the box of food under the fence at the Radom ghetto up to her act of harboring a dozen Jews in the basement of a villa belonging to a major in the German military. The final part of the book details the time that Irena spent with the partisan group as well as her own...