Witnesses Of War

Unbearably sad though it is, Witnesses of War is utterly compelling. This is clearly a work of expiation...as well as being one of profound historical substance, probably the most genuinely challenging book on the Nazis in a long while

Allan Mallinson, The Times

Superb...Stargardt makes extensive use of letters, diaries and drawings to tell gripping individual stories... A tremendous achievement, guaranteed to stimulate, move and enrich anyone that opens its pages

Matthew J. Reisz, Independent on Sunday

Nicholas Stargardt's harrowing account of the lives of children - both Jewish and non-Jewish - in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories is an essential document. The author builds a detailed picture of juvenile life under the Third Reich... Throughout this powerful book, Stargardt conveys the horrors of Nazism and the dangers of blind adherence to ideology... In this vitally important work, Stargardt turns an appalled eye on the destruction of innocence in wartime

Ian Thomson, Daily Telegraph

Nicholas Stargardt's compelling new book tells exactly what was happening to the children of Europe who had been living under the Nazi regime...Stargardt's is, indeed, a terrible story: it is an account of the endless tramp of the innocents across Europe, a saga of cruelty, starvation, separation, loss and abject misery with lives without number ending in death

Juliet Gardiner, Daily Mail

'Nicholas Stargardt evokes the individual voices of children under Nazi rule. In re-creating their wartime experiences, he has produced a challenging new historical interpretation of the Second World War

History Today

Magnificently researched and fluidly written...Witnesses of War is a powerful, unsentimental book, in which Stargardt tries to give all his subjects a fair hearing...This is an ambitious and impressive effort to see Nazi society in the round, which, for all Stargardt's sympathy for suffering across the board, never suggests a moral equivalence, never loses sight of the crucial moral distinctions between those he describes

Geraldine Bedell, Observer

Magnificent ...His concluding chapter contains some of the best historical writing about the aftermath of the war I have ever read...Stunning

David Cesarani, Guardian

Harrowing...The 21st century promises to be as full of wars as the 20th, which is why we need books like Stargardt's that remind us and our leaders what war really means

John Carey, Sunday Times

Children are history's forgotten people; amidst the sound and fury of battle, as commanders decide the fate of empires, they are never seen. Yet as Nicholas Stargardt reveals in his heart-rending account of children's lives under the Nazis, to ignore them is to leave history half-written. This is an excellent book and it tells a terrible story... As Stargardt so eloquently reminds us, the tragedy is that children were part of the equation and suffered accordingly

Trevor Royle, Sunday Herald