The Following review was contributed by: John Walsh

As a child, Hannah Podob was forced to spend more than two years inside a tiny lean-to improvised by a Polish farmer who has taken her and her parents in to protect them from Nazi persecution. Her only view of the outside world is obtained from tiny holes in the ceiling and her greatest desire is to be able to see the sky in one piece. This forced imprisonment continues for so long that her father, unable to stand up for the whole period, loses the use of his legs and takes three months to recover. Yet Hannah and her parents consider themselves lucky that they have avoided the worst of what came to be known as the Holocaust. Indeed, many of their friends and relatives are killed in this period and others die later from the privations that they suffered.

The strength of this honestly written and occasionally harrowing account of the past is in the small details of lives as they were lived and therefore of the lives that were lost. Ms Podob does not sentimentalise the past; she accepts the lack of love in her father’s family and describes the torment afflicting a daughter born in a safe haven country who feels she can never compete with the ghost of her dead sibling. If, as Salman Rushdie once observed, the migrant is the central symbol of the twentieth century, then the tales that migrants have to tell about the past are of considerable significance in our understanding of human nature and of how to make better societies. The author notes that it is the spontaneous generosity of the Polish Tomaszkow family that preserves not just her family’s lives but their souls as well since it stands as stark contrast to the betrayal of trusted friends.

Previous depictions of the Holocaust, especially Christopher Browning’s 1992 Ordinary Men, have shown how people were swept up in the evil of their times and participated in it. Reminders that there can still be compassion to strangers is always to be treasured. It is a great tragedy that the Communist regime that took over Poland at the end of the war prevented Hannah’s parents from letting the Tomaszkows continue to know how much they thought of them.