The story of a life - Aharon Apelfeld

When World War Two broke out, Aharon Appelfeld was seven years old, the child of an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family in Czernowitz. After losing his mother, murdered early on in the Nazi occupation, and then his father; and after enduring the ghetto and the two-month forced march to the camp, the ten-year-old Aharon escaped and survived, miraculously, in the fields and the forests of the Ukraine for over two years, subsisting on fruits and berries, and sleeping with cows and sheep for warmth. Appelfeld's account of these years and of those which follow - recalling the long journey south at the end of the war, to Italy and then to Israel, where he has to remake a life from nothing - bears witness to the unfathomable, in sentences of subtle power and grace. The Story of a Life is a memoir of the highest order - all the more remarkable for being the culmination of his life's work.