First Published: July 28, 2022
SPOILERS!!!
This is a short book. It starts with a woman watching over her mother, who is dying. When the old woman dies, the young woman finds a tin, which she opens and there she finds a series of old letters.
The letters were penned by Zina, who writes to her niece and nephew soon to be born. We discover that Zina is in a concentration camp, and her sister Naomi is pregnant, but she has managed to hide it from the Germans and other people in the camp. It is thanks to the help of Ruth, a friend in their barracks, Dr Saba, and a guard that Naomi manages to have her daughter, Aldona. Yet, Naomi dies a few days after giving birth, and Zina has to do everything to keep the baby hidden, and she does.
The book finishes with Aldona, who is the woman reading the letters, and realising that the woman who raised her is not her mother or her aunt, but the prisoner nurse in the camp. We don't know what happened to Zina and how Aldona ended up with Gerda.
I have to say that I found the book easy to read but far-fetched in the sense that I can't believe that a baby could be concealed for weeks or months from the Germans.
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