One Step Away from a Perfect World

Germany, 1944. Iris is eleven years old when she moves with her family to a town near Berlin. Her father is an SS captain who has been promoted to deputy commandant of the concentration camp nearby, while her mother is an authoritarian woman with a great passion for flowers. The new house is beautiful, large, and surrounded by an immense garden, which is tended by a gardener. Iris knows very little about him; she only knows that he is Jewish and that every morning he arrives from the camp, only to return there after sunset. Iris is forbidden to speak to him because he is dangerous, but her curiosity is stronger than she is. She begins secretly approaching the stranger with the shaved head and striped uniform. She also starts leaving him small gifts in a secret drawer in the tool shed, and he reciprocates with rough drawings in a notebook. Thus, day after day, a clandestine friendship grows between them, made up of hidden gestures and fleeting glances - a friendship capable of bringing down the invisible wall separating them and turning upside down the perfect world Iris believed she lived in. Reading age: 10 and up. Author: Daniela Palumbo