Overview

Hilke's Diary is a battered, chintz-covered little book with a flowery pattern, its lock (once so important to its young owner) long since broken. It has survived an incredible near-seventy years, and was the inseparable companion of a little German girl throughout the Second World War. Hilke was evacuated from Hamburg and separated from her family; in 1940 she was placed with her uncle and aunt in Meisenheim, then later (in 1942) she was sent to an estate as a companion for a little girl. Her siblings were also sent away, split up in the desperation to place them somewhere safe as bombing on Hamburg intensified with the firestorm in 1943. In 1944 Hilke was sent to a boarding school on Lake Constance, hundreds of miles from home, and when the war ended the school closed and the pupils were left on the streets with just a handful of money, no papers and no responsible adult to help them get home. Hilke then embarked on a long journey across Germany to find her family, unsure whether they had even survived the bombing. Her childhood diary was her one confidant along her arduous journey home.

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Reviews

‘You cannot but enter this child’s world. Filled with all the usual joys and anxieties of childhood, and a self-possessed determination to behave in a practical and helpful way, it is a world in which the people and events figuring in what we call “history” are fairly mysterious to her. They are facts, facts she never really questions.’ -- Matthew Parris * <i>The Times</i> *

‘You cannot but enter this child’s world. Filled with all the usual joys and anxieties of childhood, and a self-possessed determination to behave in a practical and helpful way, it is a world in which the people and events figuring in what we call “history” are fairly mysterious to her. They are facts, facts she never really questions.' -- Matthew Parris * The Times *

Author Information

CHARLOTTE CLARK is Hilke's younger sister. She translated Hilke's Diary so that today's children could share her story. She has her own story to tell of her experiences being evacuated in Germany in the war and has written papers and often gives talks on the subject. She lives in Warwickshire. Hilke married an Englishman in the 1950s. Tragically, she was killed in a car crash aged just 30, soon after having her first child. Charlotte later married her husband and brought up Hilke's son as her own.

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