Thomas Harlan Rosa Eichborn Berlin, October 2000, 215 pp. ISBN 3-8218-0693-1 Many horrible things happened in Poland during the war. The author of this magnificent, harrowing novel was a teenage leader in a Hitler youth corps, but once he grew up the scales fell from his eyes and from 1964 onwards he devoted himself to research into these happenings. Rosa is built on his findings over the best part of four decades. The link is a film-maker, Richard, who is researching an atrocity which has poisoned the ground in a remote woodland area in Poland. In the course of his enquiries he discovers the whereabouts of a number of people who had supposedly died or disappeared. Their testimony, given in various forms and styles, provides the narrative framework of the book. Some of these witnesses are almost illiterate. They are so distressed by remembering what happened that the jerky style in which their interviews are transcribed makes it clear that they could hardly get their words out. Other evidence comes from documents and files (all fictional, one supposes) in Poland and in France. Richard's narrative is often poetic, evocative of the classical German authors and composers to whom he frequently refers. We discover that he spent his last years in Africa with the White Fathers and that his film was never made. But his narrative zigzags backwards and forwards to build up a cinematic picture of what happened and to whom. Many local villagers were aware of what was going on but not themselves much involved. Others were. Rosa, the central figure, had a large bucketful of gold wedding rings, presumably booty from the camp. Franz Manderholz, a Nazi with whom she had had an affair, was sent by the Germans to fight in Italy, had his jaw shot away by Slovenian partisans, but survived to give evidence. This is a short book but covers a huge range - in time, geography, human emotions and ethical considerations. It will give British as well as German readers a great deal of food for thought.