This moving and profoundly truthful story is told in the form of diary, kept by Angelika, the sister-in-law and friend of Klara, who, after her release from Auschwitz, wandered through war-ravaged Europe for two months before returning to Paris in August 1945. Gradually, over a period of six weeks, Klara reveals, with cold anger and pitiless lucidity, the full horror of what she experienced in Auschwitz as she struggles to readapt to normal life. Not since Sophie's Choice has a novelist succeeded in conveying — with truth, dignity, power and intelligence — the inhumanity of the death camps and the scars suffered by those who survived them.