The Jews of the Nazi-administered Polish ghetto of Lodz in the Second World War were led by a strangely two-faced authority figure who realised his own survival depended on making the ghetto indispensable by turning it into an efficient industrial machine. But what of the starving cogs in his machine, the individuals desperate to believe that the trains onto which they are herded will take them to other work camps and better futures? Termed ‘one of the great Holocaust novels of the twentieth century’, this book won the prestigious August prize and has been published in over twenty languages.