In June 1942, Marie Jalowicz was a twenty-year-old forced labourer at Siemens in Berlin when two SS men arrived to pick her up. She was Jewish. Dressed only in her petticoat, she managed to slip past them. For the next two years and ten months, she lived as what the Berliners called a ‘U-boat’, going underground with no papers and no ration book, surviving on the kindness of some strangers and the sexual exploitation of others.

It was only shortly before her death in 1998 that she recorded seventy-seven tapes of her experiences, turned into the remarkable memoir Underground in Berlin (2015) by her historian son Hermann Simon, who had known nothing of his mother’s wartime past. Jalowicz’s extraordinary story is just one of many similar accounts gathered by Ian Buruma from diaries, letters, memoirs and interviews with people who lived through the Second World War in Berlin.

The title of his book came to him from his father, Leo, deported from occupied Holland in 1943 to work in Berlin making brakes for locomotives. A law student in Holland, Leo had been caught after refusing to sign an oath of loyalty to the Nazi regime. Bleiben Sie übrig,