The power of a human life

‘We will not be silent. We are your conscience. The White Rose will not leave you alone.’ This is taken from one of the resistance leaflets produced by the small Munich student resistance group of the same name, with Alexander Schmorell, Hans Scholl and his sister and Sophie, at its core. On trial, Sophie found herself up before the infamous Roland Freisler but even then still spoke her mind: ‘What we’ve written and said, you surely all think the same, but you haven’t got the courage to say it.’ Maren Gottschalk keeps her vivid writing close to her sources and is able to show where this personal courage came from, enabling her to be so different from the majority of Germans and openly to oppose the Nazi regime and its war of annihilation.