When I started to interview my grandmother Helenka for this book, she kept repeating the same words: "You can't tell anyone, Bára. No one will believe you..." Yet she told her story - and I began to write. Barbara Bisický-Ehrlich, as the chronicler of her own family history, paints a multi-generational portrait, starting with her great-grandparents in the former Czechoslovakia, through the time of her grandparents and parents, to her own experiences as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors - precisely in the Federal Republic of Germany. Time and again, world history intersects with this family's path. Names of horror like Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt are linked to their story, as well as the period of communism after 1945 in Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring. The threat of violent death constantly looms like a dark shadow over everything.