This is a haunting rites of passage story of a Jewish girl in Nazi Germany. "Laugh or Cry" is the memoir of a talented young Jewish girl in Germany in the 1930s. Like many stories of adolescence, it is a journey from innocence to experience: the delights, the disappointments, the longings, the fears and the growth in self-knowledge that any teenager may experience. However, all this is observed in the context of the terrifying rise of the Nazi Party, the establishment of the Third Reich - and the catastrophe which overtook the Jewish community to which Sylvia belonged. The author sensitively communicates the subtlety with which the poison of Nazism infected even the most intelligent people. No-one wanted to believe what was happening, until, for many, it was too late. Sylvia Hurst (nee Fleischer) was lucky - she escaped the Holocaust. Her memoir does not describe the horrors of the death camps but it shows us how they came to be.