Annotation: The protagonist of Elena Makarova's novel is Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an Austrian artist of German extraction. Together with her husband she was deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto in 1942, and in 1944 she was sent to Auschwitz. In Theresienstadt, Friedl worked in an orphanage for girls and gave art lessons. The drawings created during her lessons were preserved and taken out of Thersienstadt to serve as witnesses of life in the ghetto. ​ The novel is written in the first person, and we see an entire epoch, an entire generation of artists who grew up during World War I and became adults during World War II, through the eyes of Friedl herself. Makarova has collected material for many years, organized exhibitions, spoken with Friedl's contemporaries, and studied archives, letters and diaries. The memories of the contemporaries – students and children in Theresienstadt – are interwoven with Friedl's voice. The tragedy of this era becomes increasingly apparent as the everyday details accumulate, and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is transformed from an abstract figure into a living person, with a complicated personality and unique understandings of good and evil, talent and vocation. A person who, despite everything, did not lose faith in mercy, higher reason and art.