In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse. Buruma gives tender attention to the Jewish experience in Berlin during the war, weaving its thread into the broader fabric of this marvelously rich and vivid mosaic of urban life. The distillation of a broad-gauged reckoning with a vast trove of primary sources, including a surprising number of interviews with living survivors, STAY ALIVE is a study in extremes --- depravity and resilience, moral blindness and moral courage, pious bigotry and unchecked hedonism.

During the almost six years England was at war with Nazi Germany, Winifred and Bernard Schlesinger, Ian Buruma’s grandparents, and the film director John Schlesinger's parents, were, like so many others, thoroughly sundered from each other. Their only recourse was to write letters back and forth. And write they did, often every day. Now, in a labor of love that is also a powerful act of artistic creation, Buruma has woven his own voice in with theirs to provide the context and counterpoint necessary to bring to life not just a remarkable marriage, but a class and an age.

In 1945, one world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale, great cities around the world lay in ruins, and the ground was laid for more horror to come. In YEAR ZERO, an examination of the postwar years is intertwined with author Ian Buruma's father's attempted reentry into “normalcy” after his experience as a prisoner of war.