As poignant a chronicle as Anne Frank's diary, "The Last Jews in Berlin" tells the real-life story of a handful of Jews who boldly, defiantly, and luckily survived.
In February 1943, four thousand Jews went underground in Berlin. By the end of the war, all but a few hundred of them had died in bombing raids or, more commonly, in death camps. This is the real-life story of some of the few of them - a young mother, a scholar and his countess lover, a black-market jeweler, a fashion designer, a Zionist, an opera-loving merchant, a teen-age orphan - who resourcefully, boldly, defiantly, luckily survived. In hiding or in masquerade, by their wits and sometimes with the aid of conscience-stricken German gentiles, they survived. They survived the constant threat of discovery by the Nazi authorities or by the sinister handful of turncoat Jewish catchers who would send them to the gas chambers. They survived to tell this tale, which reads like a thriller and triumphs like a miracle. The author's skillful selection of detail and his narrative drive have created the type of footnote [to history] that illuminates an entire subject. - New York Times Book Review A tour de force . . . A consummately suspenseful narrative . . . remindful, in [its] exquisite detail, of Capote's In Cold Blood - Los Angeles Times An historian's book, a storyteller's book, and - most of all - a reader's book . . . All the real-life stuff of a John le Carré novel - Los Angeles Herald Examiner