{"product_id":"stay-alive-by-ian-buruma-9781805462897","title":"Stay Alive","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBy 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, ordinary life in Berlin would acquire an increasingly desperate cast. The last three years of the war in Berlin are truly a descent into hell, with a deranged regime in desperate free fall, an increasingly relentless pounding from Allied bombers, and the mounting dread of the approaching Soviet army. The common greeting of Berliners was now not Auf wiedersehen or Heil Hitler but \u003cem\u003eBleiben Siebrig\u003c\/em\u003e — 'Stay alive'. By war's end, Berlin's population had fallen by almost half.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAmong the people trying to stay alive in the city was Ian Buruma's own father, a prisoner conscripted into forced labour in the war economy along with 400,000 other imported workers. Buruma gives due weight to his and their experiences, which give the book a special added dimension. \u003cem\u003eStay Alive\u003c\/em\u003e is a book full of tenderness and genuine heroism, but it is by no means sentimental: again and again, we see that most people do not do the hard thing most of the time. Most people go along. It's a lesson that has not lost its timeliness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47496548810988,"sku":"9781805462897","price":59.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781805462897-stay-alive.jpg?v=1775798563","url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/products\/stay-alive-by-ian-buruma-9781805462897","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}