Cassie McCullagh

That's where the name comes from.

Were only published by her daughter, you know, many, many years after her death.

But that also has this, it captures the spirit of the time and the way that the awfulness that we know about isn't exactly apparent to the people in the books.

Yes, and what I found quite shocking actually was the Hitler Youth, the portrayal of the young children running around the town trying to seek out the hiding escapees.

Oh, that's a strong scene in the film too, isn't it?

Yes.

Yes.

Well, it's actually very interesting because I think Hollywood at that time had been receiving a lot of the diaspora from Europe of the intellectuals, particularly Jewish intellectuals from right across Eastern Europe and Germany.

And they were heading into Hollywood.

And that's where we got this amazing slew of films that would

profound and wonderfully complex and grown-up films, far different from some of the other things that we'd seen from Hollywood.

And in fact, the director of the film version of this, Fred Zinnemann, he made it not knowing that his own parents, he was Austrian, had died in the Holocaust.

He found out after the war.

But it's just worth noting, actually, if you want to see the film, it has been uploaded.

You can find it very easily online if you're interested to see a very good copy of it.

So you can watch the film, but the book is The Seventh Cross by Anna Seegers.

It's been translated, it's a new translation, by Margot Batawa-Dembauer and it's published by Virago.

Martin, thank you so much for reading this book for us.

It's been wonderful to share it with you.

Oh, thank you for giving it to me.