Young Piotr Bruck shivers as he waits naked in a draughty corridor to be examined by two men in white coats with curious instruments. The year is 1941, the place Warsaw and Piotr is an orphan and outcast, not Polack but Volksdeutscher: a Pole of German ancestry. The queue of boys is split into two and Piotr prays not to be sent to the right, to the covered army truck visible through the open doorway. He does not know the meaning of the truck but senses it cannot be good. Instead his blond hair and Nordic looks mean that the Race and Settlement programme choose him to be returned to the heart of Nazi Germany and placed with a good Nazi family in Berlin. Kaltenbach is a doctor conducting experiments for the Reich, with a wife and three children. Piotr is renamed Peter and tries to adapt, but is still treated as an Auslander: a foreigner.
Peter finds a friend in neighbour Anna Reiter and her family, German but not Nazi. The evidence of his eyes and his friendship with the Reiters opens Peter's eyes to the true nature of the Third Reich and the Nazis. As the net of a brutal regime that brooks no resistance closes in around him Dowswell's book quickly becomes a thriller and Peter and Anna are in a race against time.
Excellently written, compelling and as enlightening about the Nazi regime as Anne Frank. A fantastic book for older children about a period of history that must not be forgotten.
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