a friend and patient of the author: It is not just a matter of manners or policy that stops me from discussing the horrors of concentration camps with my dentist.

I knew that Peter was originally Hungarian. I therefore guessed even from my shallow English learning that he had suffered from bad wartime experiences.

My wife and I were much flattered, when one weekend, Peter popped his head round the corner of our living room and asked to check through his script.
We were supposed merely to apply our knowledge and skill in the English language to the correction of his draft.

I can only describe the reading as giving me a whole new dimension of experience.

Peter is about my age. My war was at worst having to climb into an air-raid shelter in a stranger’s house when the siren went. Apart from being alone with my mother as an evacuee in Scotland, my personal experience was little different from peace time.

I wept when I read of “Peter’s War”. It is all the more moving for being described as seen through the eyes of a young boy.

How bloody lucky I am to be born and living in an island just 35 km from the Continent of Europe. Peter would claim to be lucky to be alive, having survived and escaped from the thick and worst of it.

The Continental experience has always been more intensive than that of our island peoples. Just how much more is well explained.

In itself, it may help us to understand how and why those crazy Continentals think and behave as they do.

He describes an important microcosm of Man’s inhumanity to Man. Such behaviour seems to be unpreventable and unstoppable. I have learnt a lesson of someone else’s lifetime in a world where it is impossible for me or anyone else to apply it.

"Perhaps not. We attempt to live in hope"