It is easier today than ever before to reconstruct family histories. An astonishing amount of digitised information sits at our fingertips. But even if we now have so many ways of unlocking the details of past lives, their textures, and most of their secrets, can remain stubbornly elusive.

Rachel Meller’s engaging book is an account of her own journey to make sense of a family’s past that she once, as she admits, had little interest in. It took her a lot further than she imagined: to Shanghai. Her Jewish grandparents and their two daughters fled Vienna after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. One daughter, Meller’s mother, made her way to Paris and then London; her grandfather and then her grandmother and aunt, Lisbeth, made their way to Shanghai. There they joined a community of refugees from the murderous anti-Semitism that was unfolding in central and eastern Europe, a community which eventually numbered over twenty thousand.

The book’s title points to Meller’s prompt, a box of documents left by Lisbeth that allowed her to dig out this story. While she may once have had little enthusiasm for finding out more, her relatives’ stories were of interest to others, and she benefited from the work