Caging Skies by Christine Leunens (John Murray, £14.99) offers a strange slant on the horrors of Nazism. It begins in 1938 in a Vienna already fired by the Führer’s expansionism and on the brink of Germany’s unification with Austria — the infamous Anschluss.
Like much in this account, a single detail brings the freneticism of those days to life — the narrator’s grandmother is taken on a stretcher to vote in the referendum held to legitimise this calamitous union.
The story is told by Johannes Betzler, a child who develops over the following years from a nervous recruit in the Hitler youth into a still-committed but disillusioned adherent of the new double Reich. His parents shelter a fugitive Jewish girl in their large house without telling their indoctrinated Nazi son.
Only when he is horribly disfigured in a bombing raid and his brave Resistance parents disappear, does he bring himself to continue the sheltering of the girl, a friend, it turns out, of his sister who has died at the age of 12 from diabetes.
