A note about the final scene in the film, in which Solly and his brother find each other in a concentration camp, just before a liberated inmate is about to shoot Solly.

In the final days of the war Solomon Perel and his Hitler Youth class were trained to use anti-tank bazookas and stationed on the outskirts of Brunswick. Perel was awakened on the morning of his 20th birthday (Apr. 21, 1945) by the butt of an American rifle. After lining the German boys up against a wall for a few hours, the US soldiers allowed them to go. Perel found a bicycle and returned to his Hitler Youth school, which had been requisitioned to house liberated concentration camp inmates and other refugees, especially forced workers (enslaved foreigners) from the nearby Volkswagen factory (such refugees became known as DPs, for Displaced Persons).

Some of the "DPs" beat him up because they thought he was a German soldier sneaking around their premises (he had an army uniform on). Later, on the street, he encountered an emaciated man with "Jew" written on his striped uniform. Perel stopped this man, Manfred Frenkel, and convinced him that he, too, was a Jew by reciting a Jewish prayer for him. Frenkel had been imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto and then survived Auschwitz. The two began talking, and it turned out that Frenkel had been in an Auschwitz work detail with Solomon's brother David.

Solly went to Bergen-Belsen, which had been converted to a huge camp for Jewish DPs, to look for his brother. This is the source of the scene where someone calls "Solek, Solek" in the camp in the film--that is the way two boys who had been the Perel family's neighbors in Lodz recognized him in Belsen. Perel then became an interpreter for the Russians and went to Lodz and Auschwitz. He found out from a neighbor in his birth town Peine that his brother Isaac had been liberated from Dachau, and was living in Munich with his wife Mira. The brothers met soon afterwards, and Solly learned that the third brother David had survived as well and was living in Palestine. In 1947 Solly emigrated to Palestine to help fight for Palestine's independence from the British mandate.

Solly's father died of starvation in the Lodz ghetto. His mother was gassed in the back of an airtight truck at the Chelmno death camp. Bertha (who was not killed in April 1938, as the film showed) was shot in the neck during a death march from Stutthof concentration camp to Ravensbrück camp near Berlin, after she dropped to the ground from exhaustion. David's wife Pola was with her on the march and reported the story.