"On Friday, September 1, 1939, my real life began to end," Baruch Milch wrote in his diary as he sat in hiding after having lost his wife, his young Son, and his faith. Enveloped in loneliness, he decided to write his story on thousands of pages, pieces and scraps of paper - the compulsive writing of a person who had lost everything and who wrote merely to maintain his sanity and leave testimony. The life of the doctor from Galicia was shattered in June 1941. Written by a man who had been driven to loss of hope and disbelief in his ability to survive, the diary became a testament for such relatives as remained alive and an indictment of the Germans and the Ukrainians. Dr. Baruch Milch survived and moved to Israel with his second wife, Lusia. He spent years attempting to reclaim the diary, which he had handed to theJewish Historical Institute in Warsaw for safekeeping, But he met with a wall of silence. Then, in the 1980s, he decided to rewrite the diary from memory. He died before he could complete this testament. Members of his family obtained a censored typescript of the original diary, studied it, and found it fully congruent with the reconstruction. In this book, the original diary and the reconstruction are blended into a single harmonic account that substantiates the intensity of the author's ordeals, which did not diminish over the years. The censored segments were reconstructed and a third and new level of presentation was added: an introduction by the author's daughter. Shosh Avigal. The book evolved into a mosaic of intertwining perspectives and points of view: that of the father in real time, during his months in hiding until the liberation; recollections of the horrors of the war and the preceding years from a short range; and reconstruction of the events after a lapse of forty years. Twice Baruch Milch placed history on trial - first in reckoning with the facts and then in reckoning with memory. Superimposed on his vantage points is the point of view of his daughters, who retell the pursuit of the lost manuscript that became a campaign in. Search of self - "Father's book," is what the daughters (Shosh and Ella) called the manuScript that chased them for years and became an inseparable part of their painful maturation process as children of survivors of the Holocaust - and of reconciliation with the tough and loving persona of their father, the survivor. Ella Sherif is a musician; Shosh Avigal is a journalist and a researcher of the theater.