Leslie Wilson's Saving Rafael is a love story, but one in which romance interacts in horrifying ways with the larger events of history. Set in Berlin in the years before and during the Second World War, it is the story of teenager Jenny Friedemann's family, and particularly of their friendship with their Jewish neighbours, the Jakobys, from Kristallnacht up to the deportation of the Jewish population. The Jakobys' son Rafael escapes the Nazi arrests and is hidden by Jenny's family, and it is in hiding in their cramped apartment that his childhood friendship with Jenny develops into love - a love that has almost insuperable obstacles to overcome.
Many of the facets of civilian life in the Second World War will be familiar to British readers: the air-raids and shelters, the scrimping for essentials, the black market, and the dreary terror of living in a city under daily attack. Much of what happens in Jenny's Berlin mirrors the dangers and deprivations of London and other British cities, but the heroine of Saving Rafael has extra problems. Living in straitened circumstances with her dressmaker mother (her father and brother having been conscripted), she must face the constant fear of discovery by the Gestapo, and of being denounced by her Nazi neighbour Frau Mingers, by her rich businessman uncle Helmut, or by any of the hundreds of strangers whom she passes on the street. As Wilson notes in an Afterword, Jenny's fictional bravery had many real-life counterparts, with thousands of ordinary Berliners risking murder by the Nazi regime in order to protect Jewish friends and neighbours. It is a story too little known.
Wilson clearly knows the place and period well, and her research shows - not obtrusively, but in the effortless authenticity of the picture she paints of domestic life in Berlin, and in the confidence the reader feels able to place in it. We are carefully introduced to the routines and pleasures of Jenny's ordinary life, and are able to appreciate all the more keenly their gradual loss as the noose of political and economic oppression tightens. Saving Rafael is not a cheerful book, but in its affirmation of love, friendship, and common humanity, and in its rich portrait of its place and time, it is in the end a positive one.