‘The Night is Full of Stars’ by Friedrich Schmitz-Hertzberg. Sessions of York, Ebor Press Division. ISBN: 978 1 85072 397 4 Price: £9.99 plus £2.50 UK postage & packing.

There is something vaguely familiar, and slightly unsettling, about the face on the cover of this book. The eyes, looking at something just behind your left ear, convey a feeling of unease. The mouth is clearly trying not to turn down at the corners. Where have I seen this face before, I wonder? Ah yes – on video clips of hostages, filmed by those who captured them. Their unspoken question hovers in the air: ‘Will I ever get out of this alive?’

But this is not the face of a hostage but of a PoW, a prisoner of war. He was a trainee doctor, recruited into the army at the beginning of the second world war and, together with the wounded men he was caring for, taken prisoner by the advancing Russian troops less than two months before the German surrender in May 1945. This may have marked the end of the war for many, but for the author (generally referred to as Fritz), it was the start of more than four years of hardship, of suffering that must at times have bordered on the unbearable, and of having to witness the death of fellow-prisoners whose lives he was unable to save. Did the one who drew this haunting sketch of him in 1946 survive, one wonders?

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