Description
You cannot but enter this child's world. Filled with all the usual joys and anxieties of childhood, and a self-possessed determination to behave in a practical and helpful way, it is a world in which the people and events figuring in what we call history are fairly mysterious to her. They are facts, facts she never really questions.' Matthew Parris, The Times
Hilke's Diary is a battered, chintz-covered little book with a flowery pattern, its lock (once so important to its young owner) long-since broken. It was the inseparable companion of a little girl growing up in Germany during the Second World War.
Hilke was evacuated from Hamburg and separated from her family to live first with relatives and later with a farming family in the country as a companion for a little girl. She was often homesick. Her siblings were also sent away, split up in the desperation to place them somewhere safe as bombing on Hamburg intensified
