Lali and her husband Freddy Horstmann, a retired diplomat, were living at the end of the war on their small estate east of Berlin. This book tells the story of the last months of the war under the demoralised Nazis and the first months of peace under Russian occupation. Regarded with suspicion by the Nazis and then overrun by the Russians, the Horstmann's cultivated life collapsed. In the Spring of 1946 the secret police arrested Freddy, and Lali only learnt of his eventual death in a concentration camp two and a half years later. Quietly and simply told, based on diaries and notes she made at the time, it is an eloquent and heartbreaking story.