MICHAEL ROSEN needs no introduction to children, parents and teachers who are drawn to his humanity. It’s a quality which fills this short book, one in which a single paragraph or line of poetry can give rise to deep reflection or intense discussion.

Rosen’s hunt for his missing relatives, in particular two great-uncles about whom his father said: “They were there at the beginning of the war but they had gone by the end,” covered many years of research and culminated in this book, a mix of personal family history interspersed with the general history of the rise of the nazis and WWII.

Pitched at anyone over the age of 10, the factual text is broken up by poems, photos and letters, with the prose telling the story of his research and the poems exploring his emotional responses to his findings.