With all this happening around me, writing a book of fiction seemed – often, at the time – a ridiculous, self-indulgent game when there were so many more important things going on out there in the real world. But stories, fiction, have a power. A good book can reach out and pull a reader in to a world they know nothing about. It can emotionally engage in a way facts and news often cannot. Characters from a great book can live in the minds of the reader.

My original plan had been to write the book from the Jewish experience. But the more I learnt, the more I wanted to understand the mindset of the Nazis. How could a people, a deeply civilised, democratic nation, become so unbelievably cruel; to de-humanise one another, and commit atrocities on such an unimaginable scale? The more I read, the more I realised that what I wanted to say could perhaps be more powerfully told if I were to climb inside the head of a Nazi. To tell the tale of someone young, who was fed a twisted ideology, taught hatred from day one. Someone who knew no other way. What could possibly change their outlook to become so against everything their family and the society around them believed?

To research for the book, I read widely, including a large variety of texts, non-fiction and fiction, and accounts of those who lived through these times; contemporaneous letters and diaries, recordings of testimonials, as well as having the benefit of access to PHD theses and family papers. I also read Mein Kampf and visited Leipzig. In all of this I had a good deal of help from my sister Kathleen, with both research and translation. In Leipzig, I was able to interview some incredibly helpful people including Dr Thomas Töpfer, the then Director of the Schools Museum; Dr Andrea Lorz, a German historian specialising in the history of the Jews in Leipzig; and Dr Hubert Lang, a retired lawyer with a special interest in Jewish legal history in Leipzig, and the author of books on this subject. I explored the town extensively, including the area of Gohlis (which features in the book), where my father and his family lived. I was put in touch with a gentleman in London, Peter Held, who had travelled to England as a teenager on the Kindertransport, and who had lived in the same street as my father’s cousins in Leipzig. He remembered my father’s family well. He was ninety-four when I met with him in the summer of 2016. Sadly, he passed away only a few weeks later.

Whilst talking about research, I’d like to mention that this book is a work of fiction, and that certain aspects of historical detail have been altered for the sake of the story. For example, certain people, speeches, locations and events are the product of my imagination, or the amalgamation or alteration of facts. One particular invention is the ‘Hausfrau School’. There were various Reich Bride Schools in existence at the time, offering courses in household management. In fact, there were various different courses aimed either at more working class wives-to-be, or others for middle class women or the ‘elite’ who were marrying members of the SS. The ‘Hausfrau School’ Hetty is threatened with is, in my imagination, more of a residential, finishing-school-type institution, hence I have differentiated it from what really existed by giving it a different name.