This is an autobiographical novel by Tommy Mandl (1926-2007), a musician, philosopher, author and psychologist. Mandl was a Czechoslovak Jew who grew up in the vibrant German-Jewish culture of prewar Czechoslovakia. In 1942, he and his parents were deported to the Terezin ghetto, where he played in the camp orchestra and took part in many other cultural activities that were the hallmark of the ghetto. His eyewitness accounts of every detail of camp life and of the brilliant outpouring of cultural activities in the ghetto are unique. In 1944, Mandl and his father were transported to Auschwitz, thence to several Dachau-Kaufering subcamps where his father died. In 1945, Mandl was liberated and repatriated to Czechoslovakia, returned to his studies, and received his doctorate in the performing arts (violin) in 1948. He and his wife Jaroslava (piano) began to teach at the Ostrava Academy of Music.

As with Nazism, Mandl found Communism to be an oppressive system that was destructive of the human spirit. His description of his years under Communism is as vivid and detailed as his description of the Nazi era. In 1961, Mandl escaped by eluding his guards while with a tourist group in Nasser's Egypt. Following a stint in an Egyptian jail, he was deported to Greece and West Germany, interrogated for months by western intelligence services who took him for a spy, then finally released. Further tribulations awaited Mandl in the West Germany refugee system, but he was finally granted refugee status and released. He settled in Cologne, where be befriended the Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Boell, who was instrumental in a prearranged "kidnapping" of Jaroslava Mandl from Czechoslovakia using his own automobile.

Once, reunited, the Mandls performed in Western Europe;, worked for Deutsche Welle, a German analog to Radio Free Europe; and twice emigrated to the USA before permanently settling in West Germany where Mandl taught English and devoted himself to writing, psychology, philosophy and lecturing.