This is an excellent and illuminating book. It portrays life in Germany from 1936 to 1945/46, through the eyes of a young girl growing into womanhood, who gradually comes to realise the enormity of what is happening around her. It is a perspective on the war years inside Germany that rarely gets a hearing; it is written with insight, honesty and humility. The author, Marianne Mackinnon, was to leave Germany not long after the war and make her home in England.