Penguin Books Australia

At the heart of this wrenching memoir of a teenage girl's wartime survival is something utterly unexpected: a love story that blazes briefly in a dark corner of occupied Poland.

'These are stories to move the heart profoundly; to elicit
gratitude for all that we have; powerful stories to make us
determined to speak out and take action against prejudice or
hateful gossip; stories to encourage a vigorous, constructive
questioning of authority; stories to remind us always that the
price of liberty is, indeed, eternal vigilance, by all the people, on
behalf of all the people.'...

A village tries to save itself through the sheer force of imagination – all because of an eleven-year-old-girl.

In 1939, the residents of the tiny Romanian village of Zalischik are counting on their isolation to protect them from the catastrophe sweeping Europe.  When a mysterious stranger is washed up on the riverbank and the illusion of peace is shattered, the villagers are forced to acknowledge...

In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years - across oceans, deserts, and mountains - but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless.

In 1938, when her diary begins, Helga is eight years old. Alongside her father and mother and the roughly 40,000 Jews who lived in Prague at the time, she endures the first wave of the Nazi invasion and racist brutality: her father is denied work, schools are closed to her, she and her parents are eventually confined to their flat. Gradually, as the Nazis' full intentions unfold, deportations begin...