A devastating novel based on the author’s grandmother’s experiences sheds light on the trials of Romanian Jews during the Holocaust. In the late 1930s, Frederieke lives in Czernowitz with her depressed mother; glamorous sister Astra; and loving, protective grandfather Opa. Rieke adores and is exasperated by her older sister in equal measures; she often tags along with or covers for Astra when Astra meets up with her philandering lover, Marcel, a doctor. Meanwhile, the war arrives in their beautiful, cosmopolitan city. The Soviet occupation leads to a tightly controlled food supply and unwelcome divides as neighbors spy and report on one another. When the Nazis take over, Rieke and her family are ordered into a crowded ghetto with other Jews, but in a stroke of luck they avoid deportation because Marcel’s medical skills are needed at a local hospital. Life under Nazi rule is dangerous and uncertain, and Rieke faces extreme hardships: A man who offers the family shelter and later brings them food secretly and repeatedly sexually assaults her as “payment,” and her chronic cough, which she suspects is tuberculosis, eventually requires hospitalization. In the final moments of the story, Rieke makes a critical decision about her future, providing a welcome sense of hope after so much suffering. (Ages 14 and older)