In front of the house a German A.A. battery blazed away at the heavy Russian bombers overhead. In the well of the staircase three German horses were tethered without food or water, slowly starving to death; and in the cellar, surrounded by sick, desperate civilians, a girl of fifteen sat on a heap of coal writing her diary by the light of a make-shift candle.

The horrors of Budapest in 1945 start from the pages of this book; hunger, thirst, disease, the terrible carnage in the streets, the infernal din of battle, the suffocating terror of death. Every character is sharply drawn by this talented sensitive girl.

With the Russian entry into Budapest, a nightmare wave of atrocities overwhelmed the Hungarians and many of them perished. But Christine Arnothy and her parents amazingly survived to make a desperate escape over the Austrian Border. Fortunately, she managed to retain her diary, and it is from this document, after several years of intense poverty and hardship, that she has written this outstanding book, which compels the reader's attention from the first paragraph to the last.