Gone to Ground is in many ways a heartening book, about how ordinary German men and women could and did behave imaginatively and generously, often at great danger to themselves. It belongs with Hans Fallada’s novels, and Victor Klemperer’s diaries, as a portrait of a German city during the Nazi years, many of its inhabitants neither good nor bad, but simply intent on survival, and willing to take risks as a reminder that they were, at heart, human beings, with sympathy for those in trouble. The people in her apartment block gave her food, watched over her. There is nothing sentimental in Jalowicz’s writing. She simply records what she perceives, and how she felt. Even the obligatory sexual encounters are described calmly, as necessary transactions for survival.