Bread for the Departed details the experience of the Jewish community in Warsaw between 1940 and 1942; the final chapters take place during the mass deportation of Warsaw's Jewish community to death camps. Episodic, chaotic as the teeming ghetto itself, the novel records the inexorable breakdown of morals and loyalties that accompanied the physical deterioration of the ghetto population.

BOGDAN WOJDOWSKI (1930–1994) was born in to a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1930. He committed suicide in 1994. 

HENRYK GRYNBERG was born in Warsaw in 1936. He is known for his writings on the Jewish experience of World War II.

MADELINE G. LEVINE is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"Bread for the Departed is without a doubt the best novel about the Warsaw Ghetto and one of the best literary depictions of the Holocaust." —Henryk Grynberg