Hans Georg-Behr's remarkable account of a childhood spent in Nazi Austria is a powerful indictment of the toll that war takes on children, whichever side they find themselves on. To a five-year-old boy, having a high ranking Nazi for a father means trying to come to terms with a bizarre family - his kindly, liberal grandparents whose estate provides wartime refuge for all manner of unlikely visitors, his cold-hearted mother, once a famous opera singer, now reduced to running an inn, and his older brother, who struts around in his Hitler Youth uniform, convinced of imminent Nazi victory. When that victory does not come, all the Nazi flags in the house are hastily cut up to make new Austrian ones and the swastikas are turned into cleaning rags, but Behr shows that war's legacy is not so easily discarded.