Towards the end of the Second World War, Lali Horstmann and her husband Freddy, a retired diplomat and art collector, were living at Kerzendorf, an elegant eighteenth-century house with a small park, avenues, statues and a garden, fifteen miles east of Berlin. The house was destroyed one night by allied bombers and the Horstmanns moved, with a few treasured tapestries and other possessions, into the agent's little house in the park. It was to this small house that the Russian Secret Police came one spring night in1946 and took Freddy away with them into the dark. It was two and a half years later that Lali learned, almost by chance, that Freddy had died of starvation in a Russian concentration camp only a few miles from their home. Lali Horstmann's account of the last months of the war under the desperate and demoralised Nazis and the terrifying arrival of the Russians is both eloquent and heartbreaking.