The prologue is narrated by the author. World War II. More than five million children under the age of fourteen were imprisoned in German concentration camps. According to the International Union of former child prisoners of fascism, only one out of ten survived… This is the story of a Russian boy Alyosha, whom everyone simply called Len’ka. He turned nine when the first columns of German soldiers marched into his native village in the Smolensk region. And behind those columns came unbelievable humiliations, merciless torture, inhuman suffering, agonizing hunger, and terrible pain. He saw with his own eyes how the fascists dealt with his fellow villagers, he nearly lost his mother, and tried to fight back by joining a spontaneously formed partisan detachment. But in that terrible summer of 1941 it was hard to resist the dreadful “brown plague”—along with his mother, Len’ka was forcibly sent to a German labor camp, where a minor boy faced not only unbearable conditions of confinement and work, but also the most real tortures. The novel is based on documentary material, historical facts, and, of course, on the living memories of the main hero of this book—Aleksey Astakhov.