It was only by accident that Peter as a child discovered that his father, Fred Bradley, was in fact born Fritz Brandes. And it was only after his father’s death in 2004 that Peter was able to begin to piece together the family’s story and set out on the journey—literally and figuratively—that forms the basis of his book. Peter’s family were German Jews. In 1938, his father was imprisoned in Buchenwald in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. He was released the following spring when he was granted a visa to settle temporarily in the UK. He arrived in London in May 1939, aged 24, penniless and alone. But when the Nazis invaded France and the Low Countries in May 1940, he was arrested by the British as an ‘enemy alien’ and shipped to an internment camp in Canada. His parents’ fate was to be very different: they were deported by train from their home in Bavaria to Latvia, to the Riga ghetto and nearby camps, where they were murdered. Peter felt a growing need not only to find out what had happe