What is the most horrifying thing about this memoir of three dreadful years as a slave labourer of the Nazis? The gradual disappearance of normality from the Polish town of Bielsko where Gerda Weissmann lived with her ordinary Jewish family? The sudden disappearance of her father on a train out of the ghetto: "There he stood, already beyond my reach, my father, the centre of my life, just labelled JEW"? The kick delivered by an SS man to her dying sister when she begged for water, perhaps? No: such details, horrifying and horrifyingly familiar from Holocaust literature, pale in comparison to Weissmann's determined uncovering of small acts of kindness and decency amid the horror; if just one person could do one decent thing, how could the horror have happened? It did, though, and this heartbreaking book is a burning reminder which should go on everyone's list of compulsory reading. A.W.