[1][2][3] Anneliese Stern was born in Berlin and then spent the first twelve years of her life growing up in Mannheim, to where her parents relocated soon after her birth.

Her maternal grandmother, Regina Ruben, was a militant feminist and Marxist, and a "companion in arms" to Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg.

The hatred, targeted on political opponents and Jews, became an underpinning of government policy very much more quickly than many had thought possible, and a few weeks after the Nazi takeover Heinrich Stern, by now serving on the local town council, was arrested.

[2] With millions of others, the Sterns hastily joined the exodus to the "free zone" in the southern half of the country which was governed for the next four years as an (initially semi-autonomous) puppet state from Vichy.

[1] (Olivier Freud and his family, like the Sterns, classified as Jewish by the Nazis and by the Vichy authorities, were living as refugees in southern France.

The camp had originally been set up to accommodate returning "internationalist" fighters from the Spanish Civil War and was now being used to hold political and race based refugees from Nazi Germany.

[2] He also collaborated with the Abbé Glasberg, a Resistance contact known to be working with the OSE and the Cimade, in order to try and rescue children who had been interned at Gurs.

Faced with the relentless advance of the Soviet army, the authorities now took the decision to evacuate concentration camps in the eastern part of Germany, which included Silesia.

[4] In Moscow another of her mother's sisters, the gynaecologist and noted abortion rights campaigner Martha Ruben-Wolff, had committed suicide in 1939 after her husband was unexpectedly branded an anti-Soviet spy and "purged".

[13] Pierre Vidal-Naquet considered that the little compilation "matched the peaks of concentration camp literature, alongside francophone versions of works by Primo Levi, "Ravensbrück" by Germaine Tillion, together with "le Grand Voyage" and "Quel beau dimanche" by Jorge Semprún.

[4] As Anne-Lise Stern left Germany, her father made the opposite journey, appointed an army doctor and mandated to visit several of the Nazi concentration/death camps.

[3] In 1953 she met Jenny Aubry, a pioneer in child psychoanalysis in France, and joined her team,[15] working initially at the Hôpital Bichat, and later at the Hospital for Sick Children in Paris.

She became convinced of a deep connection between holocaust experiences and the extreme mental suffering that it had led to in affected children, and accordingly took on the more difficult cases.

[16] Prompted by the "events" (major street unrest and strikes) of May 1968, in 1969 Stern, with a group of supporters including the analysts Pierre Alien et Renaude Gosset, set up the "Laboratoire de psychanalyse", a treatment facility for destitute patients.

[4] In 1979, alarmed by the public manifestations in France of Holocaust denial, began to conduct regular seminars under the collective heading, "The camps, history, psychoanalysis - their connections with contemporary events in Europe".

In other chapters she describes her teenage years before the war, including her truncated period of study at Tours and the most significant encounters that she had before her deportation to the camps in Germany in 1944.

The book allows the reader to share the author's vision of a "rebirth experience" resulting from the deportation and its aftermath, which provided the all-embracing context for her subsequent work as a psychoanalyst.