Her family were Christians, by birth Roman Catholic, then later by choice Bibelforscher, a small Christian group no more than 20,000 strong in Germany at the time, but who attracted a disproportionate ire from the Gestapo for their refusal to conform to Nazi standards. In German schools and churches the Lord's Prayer had the added the words, "God bless our Führer and the Fatherland!", which the Bibelforscher refused to say, because they refused to heil Hitler as the country's saviour, insisting that all people of all races were equally loved by God. They refused to be enlisted in the Nazi's killing machine. Nor would they do anything that supported the crudely unchristian Nazi military - not even mend their uniforms. All of which put them on a collision course as certain as any faced by early Christians in the Roman arenas. Teachers, local officials, supervisors and judges - almost all found themselves able to enforce their satanic mantra, "Let it be known no-one can swim against the German current! The one who doesn't want to bend has to be broken!" To Simone's own surprise at times, she swam against that foul current, and neither bent nor broke. She and her family emerged from incarceration and torture deeply scarred, but with their integrity intact.

All this is the stuff of martyrs, heroes and heroines, from which a triumphalist hagiography might be expected to emerge. But this astonishing book is not called "Conquering the Nazi Lion", or even "Fighting the Lion", but more modestly, "Facing the Lion." It is the story of a young girl determined to remain a Christian and not descend to the amoral degradation of so many of those around her, battling pride, anger, hatred of the brutally sadistic Herr Ehrlich - and an urgent need for revenge, but 'a Christian doesn't pay back evil for evil," her mother tells her.

At first the ban on worship was almost fun - holding their forbidden Christian meetings in an allotment shed, smuggling Bible literature in bicycle frames. But then the Nazis grabbed the schools. All children must give the German greeting, heiling Hitler as saviour. Like the Three Hebrews threatened with the fiery furnace, Simone, though often terrified, would keep her integrity. She would not drop Jesus for Hitler, although it posed problems for a frightened eleven-year-old: "Hiding behind tall girls in class was possible, but in the street? It meant scrutinising people like a hunter, or rather like the prey watches the hunter! Every walk was nerve-wracking."