This work is an extensive account of the author's personal experiences, in the form of memoirs, as well as a reflection of collective memory. His personal journey is set against a canvas composed of the historical events of the tumultuous period of the first half of the last century.

His writing is characterized by insight and acuity, as well as a critical disposition, without the development of a polemic being an end in itself. His memoirs are marked by fundamental ambiguity, as he always navigated the borders of various realms, both physical and mental.

Ehrenburg, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, expresses a refined vision of a past that—implicitly yet clearly—serves as a denunciation of the present and a silent call for a different future. He does not simply write a testimony for the dead; he does something more: he delivers a message to the living.

Although the work could not easily be characterized as humanistic by typical criteria, it places humanity at its center and advocates for love and harmonious coexistence as the ultimate refuge of human existence.

“The reader of this book knows that throughout my life I have done nothing but strive to connect justice with beauty and the new social order with art. There were two Ehrenburgs, rarely did they live peacefully, very often one crushed and trampled the other; this was not duality but the difficult fate of a person who often fell into errors but who hated with all the strength of his soul the idea of betrayal.”

“I sit and reflect on what I have seen and lived, searching for a way out. It seems I was right in my youth when I thought that light drives away darkness; it’s just that in those distant years I took education for culture and knowledge for conscience.”

“We often speak of the morality of society that has been founded on greed, the struggle for a loaf of bread. Two centuries B.C., Plautus entertained the Romans with his comedies; of all these works, only four words stuck in our memory: ‘Homo homini lupus est’ (Man is a wolf to man). Plautus wrongly mixed wolves into this issue. L.A. Manteifel, who studied their lives, told me that wolves rarely fight among themselves; and if they happen to attack humans, it is only when they no longer know what is happening to them from hunger. However, I have often seen people in my life chase, torment, and kill others without any need pushing them to do so. If beasts could think and formulate maxims, then surely, a white-haired wolf, whose neighbor had torn a tuft of his fur out with his teeth, would howl: ‘Wolf is to man what man is to wolf.’”