This slim novel, a mere 136 pages, packs a devastating punch. Elisabeth Danzinger, in her late 30's, leads a very unremarkable life as the companion/dogsbody to a snobbish Englishwoman. For the last fifteen years in August, she has taken her week's vacation on Mon, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. She follows the exact pattern for the seven days. On Sunday she arrives at Tamarisks, the beautiful guest house converted from a Lutyens-designed mansion. Monday she cycles the island. Every Tuesday she visits the local museum. Wednesday is always reserved for a visit to Sandweg church with its evocative frescoes of the massacre of the Holy Innocents. On Thursday, she seeks out the prehistoric sites and the primal forest. A very old woman, the local story teller, receives a visit from Elizabeth on Friday. And on Saturday, she goes to the second large home, an Italian-style villa and also a guest house/museum, to see the period musical instruments and tour the gardens. In a break from the tradition of the past 15 years, this time she hears a special concert performed in the drawing room.

In each chapter, named for the day of the week, a bit more is revealed about Elizabeth Danzinger until the reader knows her tragic history and realizes that this vacation is both a memorial to her lost family and a way for her to control her inner demons. For Elizabeth's parents built Tamarisks and her uncle owned the Villa. Her father and his brother were German professors who married Jewish twin sisters. She and her cousin Daniel spent wonderful summers on the island investigating its natural history, prehistory, folklore, and legends. They sat at the feet of the local story-teller and listened rapt to the tales of great heroes and the slaughter of the island children by raiders.. As they explored their private paradise they left a tiny engraving in unobtrusive places...under the arm of a bench or on a small rock in the crevice of a prehistoric circle. It is these carvings that Elisabeth looks for each day as she retraces her life.

The Nazi Party's rise to power was ignored by the two families, even when the professors lost their jobs because of their wives' ethnicity. They refused to believe that Germans would accept the Party's anti-intellectual, racist doctrine. In 1939, Elisabeth and Daniel spend one last summer on Mon. They make beautiful music together on the period instruments and stow away their journals and diaries. When Daniel's father frantically phones them to return to Germany because war is about to break out and the family must remain together, Daniel sets up a fund with the bank to pay the two housekeepers to remain in the houses until the families return.

Elisabeth and Daniel pledge, if they are separated by the war, each to return every August after the war is over until they are reunited on this beloved island. But only Elisabeth returns year after year. Daniel has disappeared and their parents die in concentration camps. Russell does not concentrate on the Holocaust except for one incredibly horrific act which Elisabeth somehow survives.

So each year, for fifteen years beginning in 1945, Elisabeth pays homage to her ghosts. She does not claim the houses, now owned by the Danish government and operated by the same housekeepers who ran the family homes, because it would be too painful to have to face the memories every day. She is content to make her pilgrimage from London each August. She is physically alive, but suffers from surviver's guilt. She cannot heal, only cope.

And in the year 1960, on the final day of her visit, Elisabeth's life comes full circle in a shattering conclusion. ( )