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This WW2 memoir of a 15-year-old Jewish girl in Poland, hidden with her family in a damp, cramped bunker under the floorboards of a house occupied by a man believed to be a virulent anti-Semite, draws inevitable comparisions with [[''The Diary of Anne Frank]]''. Four families endure terrible hardship while hiding from the Nazis; Clara Kramer kept a diary of their lives, recording their gruelling existence and daily terror of discovery. This book is based on those diaries, from her perspective sixty years later.
I had been really looking forward to this book, yet I really struggled with the first few chapters. Clara's detailed yet dull description of her extended family, and her rather stolid writing style (she was assisted in writing it by Stephen Glanz), made turning the pages hard work, despite the tragic events she described. It may be churlish, as the author has certainly survived the hardest of times, but I longed for Anne Frank's spiky vivacity to enliven this tale, and colour the characters that inhabit it.
