As a child Ruth Kluger knew that danger and death were all around, but the grown-ups weren't telling her. In Birkenau in 1944, and after it in 1945, she and her mother chose several times not to wait and hope, but to take a risk and go. These two experiences – risk-taking and truth-hiding – shaped her, and shaped this book.

It recalls two others. In its full version, Anne Frank's Diary shows us not an airbrushed heroine but a real girl – quarrelling with her mother, touchy, moody and vain. We weren't trusted with this real girl until the 1990s. Then, in 1995, came Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. That explored the