One aspect of Holocaust experience and literature has been largely undocumented – up to now. The value and importance of Tricks of Fate is that it fills in this apparent void in Holocaust literature.

Morris Gruda’s flight through Nazi occupied Poland and into the Soviet Union, his struggles for survival and his return to Poland at the end of the war is a unique story, but one which he shared with many other Jews. Indeed, it is estimated that 300,000 Jews were caught in or escaped into Russian-occupied Poland shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. Many of these Jews later participated in the Russian war against Germany after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Morris Gruda was one of them.