The period of the rise of Nazism and its subsequent terror remains an inexhaustible source of testimony from among its opponents and victims. The memoirs of the historian Edgar Feuchtwanger, nephew of the famous German writer Lion Feuchtwanger, first written at the age of 88 and published with the help of Bertilo Scali, are another surprising example of this: in a narrative whose impact is enhanced by the present tense, the author returns to the time when he lived from from the age of five to fourteen with his family in Munich in close proximity to Adolf Hitler. Young readers in particular - but not only - will undoubtedly be deeply impressed by Edgar's honest account of a Jewish boy, whose everyday joys of childhood, lived in the safety of home and in other favorite places in Bavaria, surrounded by the love of parents, nanny and extended family, are gradually penetrated by the threat of danger, connected with the person of the neighbor across the street, whom Edgar does not understand at first: while in the first years of schooling he is proud of drawings dominated by a swastika or a photograph of Hitler, a few years later he finds himself alone with a feeling of conscious hatred, already completely identified with his Jewish roots among classmates - members of the Hitler Youth.

Most of the members of the extended Feuchtwanger family managed to escape from Germany in time, Edgar's parents almost miraculously survived, but his aunt Bella perished in Terezín. Edgar himself came to Great Britain in 1939, where he was taken in by a family in Cornwall. He graduated from Cambridge University and lives near Winchester.