The bombs are falling, the smoke is rising from the concentration camps, but all Hitler's daughter knows are the lessons with Fraulein Gelber and the hedgehogs she rescues from the cold. Is it all too long ago to really matter . . .
Some books take a long time to grow.
Hitler's Daughter first germinated when I was still a child, and a kind man helped me with my German translation. It was late at night and he'd been drinking. Something in the story we were translating must have caught him, because there in the silent house he began to tell me another story, about a 14 year old boy in Nazi Germany who joined the Nazi party and worked in a concentration camp and when the war ended was smuggled out to Australia. And no, that isn't really how it happened, because I don't want to identify him. I forgot about the incident as teenagers do for over thirty years.