ABOUT
THE BOOK

Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing West in a provincial German railway station in 1945, Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns.
Many years earlier, Helene and her sister Martha’s childhood in rural Germany is abruptly ended by the outbreak of the First World War. Her father comes home only to die. Their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. Helene calls the condition blindness of the heart, and fears the growing coldness of her mother, who hardly seems to notice her daughters any more.