Sometimes the smell of rotten straw or a bird's cry is enough to hurl me far away and deep within myself. The one who says this - the writer Aharon Appelfeld - was seven years old at the outbreak of World War II, a sheltered child of assimilated Jews in Czernowitz, a little boy named Erwin. His childhood ends overnight: Germans and Romanians murder his mother, and he hears her scream. After months in the ghetto and the death march through the steppes of Ukraine, he arrives at the camp, separated from his father. Erwin manages to escape into the woods. A tree with red apples becomes indelibly etched in the mind of the hungry child.