Michael Edelstein was headstrong and independent, a self-described mamzer. He was 10 years old when he escaped under the barbed wire fence of the compound into which the Jewish townspeople of Skala-Podolsk had been rounded up on the morning of Sukkoth 1942. 

Six months later, he escaped again from the Borszczow ghetto on the eve of its liquidation. Then he survived for another year of hiding in forest bunkers and the ruins of buildings until the Nazis were finally driven from western Ukraine in 1944.