This book tells about the Jewish ghetto created by the Nazis in the Polish city of Lodz, about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who headed the Judenrat, the body of the Jewish ostensible self-government of the ghetto, and about everyday life in the ghetto. Rumkowski was an extremely controversial figure - the “father of the ghetto”, at first responsible for everything, then deprived of any opportunity to influence events, executing and pardoning, building schools and shelters and suppressing strikes, whom many consider a traitor and a blind tool in the hands of the Germans, but who divided with the inhabitants of the ghetto their fate to the end; he was deported to Auschwitz and died with his entire family. This is a novel about life in areas surrounded by barbed wire in front of the whole city, about the deadening discipline prescribed by the Germans, about life-killing slave labor, cold, deaths from starvation - and about the well-fed life of the ghetto elite, full of social entertainment. About deportations, when children, old people, and the sick are torn from families and sent to death, and about how all 250 thousand inhabitants are gradually sent from the ghetto to death camps. Only 10 thousand of them miraculously survived. But first of all, this is a book about how people remain people, care about others, about strangers, about how they create the “Chronicle of the Ghetto” with the whole world - a newspaper that served the author as a unique source of information, about how they teach children, keep faith, fall in love, save loved ones. With his novel, Steve Sem-Sandberg provides an unforgettable, unprecedented insight into the reality of the Holocaust in world literature. The book has been translated into twenty languages and was awarded the highest Swedish literary award, the August Prize. This is a book that is now impossible not to read.