This book starts with the idea of a woman abandoning her nine-year-old son at a railway station. That is the first chapter. Then what the book does is to give you the story behind all that, which is her career as a nurse. She falls in love with someone who dies and then she marries again, but unhappily, to a man who turns into a Nazi supporter. The setting is Germany before and during the Second World War and she is Jewish.

It is written in a matter-of-fact sort of way and it doesn’t really adopt any sort of position on the ideas of forgiveness. But the reason I thought of it in respect to forgiveness, or what could better be described as acceptance, is because it brings up this question of the Jewish attitude towards the Germans and the Nazis, which has always struck me as being a very interesting one. 

The woman in the book seems to just get by; she just has to run her life as best she can. She is a nurse and she sees the whole of the collapse of Germany in 1945 as the Allies move in from both sides. The book doesn’t adopt a moral position in any way. It implies an acceptance: that is what happened, not that it was good, but it simply happened.

Right at the end of the book there is the possibility of her being reunited with her abandoned child, but the son, now a teenager, refuses to see her. There was no forgiveness from him, despite the fact that she maintains that she abandoned him for justifiable reasons.

I am actually appearing with the author, Julia Franck, at Jewish Book Week in London next week.