In this his­tor­i­cal nov­el set dur­ing World War II, a thir­teen-year-old boy is left orphaned after a Ger­man tank strikes his par­ents’ car in a small Pol­ish vil­lage. Peter’s fam­i­ly is of Ger­man descent, and he has the prized nordisch look of an Aryan, so he is spared a harsh­er fate and, instead, is repa­tri­at­ed to Berlin to live with a Ger­man pro­fes­sor of Racial Sci­ence. Although he is an aus­lan­der or for­eign­er, Peter is required to join the Hitler-Jugend youth corps and imag­ines becom­ing a pilot in the Luft­waffe, but he can­not escape his Pol­ish ori­gins, par­tic­u­lar­ly when he wit­ness­es the bru­tal treat­ment of Pol­ish work­ers who are beat­en, starved and even­tu­al­ly sent east to Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps. Peter befriends a girl whose par­ents seem less stead­fast in their sup­port of the Nazis than his host fam­i­ly. The Reit­ers care­ful­ly hide their polit­i­cal lean­ings out­side their own home and, as the tide of the war turns, Peter learns that they have been sup­ply­ing food to fam­i­lies hid­ing Ger­man Jews in Berlin. When their sub­ver­sive activ­i­ties are ulti­mate­ly dis­cov­ered, Peter and the Reit­ers make a dar­ing escape to Swe­den, leav­ing behind a Ger­many that has already begun its hell­ish decline. With com­pelling char­ac­ters and an intrigu­ing plot, this is a nov­el that expos­es an aspect of the war not often dealt with, name­ly the life of every­day Ger­man cit­i­zens whose per­son­al beliefs con­tra­dict that of the dic­ta­to­r­i­al regime under which they are liv­ing. From the sti­fling of out­side influ­ences such as Amer­i­can swing music, to the noto­ri­ous med­ical exper­i­ments con­duct­ed on inno­cents in an attempt to prove the valid­i­ty of Aryan racial supe­ri­or­i­ty, this is a force­ful book of his­tor­i­cal depth. Rec­om­mend­ed for ages 12 and up.