What were the Nazis planning to do with these highly educated Jews? Experiment on them? Kill them first? He and his siblings (three brothers and a sister) were prisoners at Budzyn, a German labor camp near Krasnik, Poland, and he'd kept himself alive in the years leading up to the war by making insane, desperate bets on the kindness of strangers-sleeping in fields, hiding in empty oil drums-and trusting his sharp instincts.

What could this mean? Orenstein had heard rumors of evacuations and mass liquidations. The voice blared out again: 'All Jewish scientists, engineers, inventors, chemists and mathematicians must register immediately.' Orenstein had just endured the latest perverse humiliation perpetrated by the SS guards, who had chased 400 wet, naked prisoners from the shower house out into the snow, then pummelled the frozen men as they climbed back inside, one by one, through a small window. Henry Orenstein was standing outside his concentration camp barracks, shivering, when the amplified voice of his salvation cut through the frigid air: 'All Jewish scientists, engineers, inventors, chemists and mathematicians must register immediately.' It was January 1944, and his fellow prisoners were suffering and dying all around him-beaten during morning roll call for standing half a step out of line hanged for trying to escape shot in the head just because.

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