Zeev Portenoy was nine when the Nazis invaded Tuchin, his Ukrainian hometown, in 1941, forcing his family and the other Jews into a ghetto while he went on the run. For the next four years, he wandered aimlessly around the countryside, pretending to be Ukrainian or Polish just to survive. He knew he was Jewish but just didn’t understand why everyone wanted to kill him, writing down his experiences in a song. ‘There was this fear that one day they would find me so I kept the song on me,’ he said. ‘I put the song inside one of my long boots so that if they caught me and killed me, somebody would find the song.’ Now in his 80s, his voice breaks as he sings the words he wrote as a child: ‘I was still a small lad / when the Nazi beast / took over my life / And took me away from / My parents forever.’ He survived the genocide. But 1.5 million other Jewish children did not. Their

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