Book opens with Hanna and her family ,who are Polish jews being discovered in a farmhouse where they have been hiding for 2 years during WW2. They are transported back to the Ghetto in Warsaw where they discover that the Germans are slowly starving the jewish people kept there as rations are only 200 calories a day. Hanna looks back on her life before the war, why the family hid and then her present life in the ghetto.
Alexander has obviously researched the lives of these people very well, however, I found Hanna 's descriptions somewhat clinical although it could be that I have read so many TRUE Holocaust stories, most set in concentration camps, that I have become jaded. I also found the ending a little abrupt too. PLOT SPOILER: Her dad is shot, her mother and sister die of a fever, so she and her brother join the Polish resistance. ( )