What grabs and holds one's attention on reading "Facing the Lion - Memoirs of a Young Girl in Nazi Europe" is the author's blazing honesty about her shortcomings and emotional conflicts. George Orwell, jibed with rancid cynicism that "A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats," but this frank memoir bucks the trend. A young girl of strong religious convictions is sent to a brutal Nazi reformatory to make her into a 'real German.' She suffers a 'series of defeats' and comes close to being institutionalised by sheer misery, deprivation and isolation, but turns it all into a heart-warming victory of the individual over the monstrous Nazi state.

Simone Liebster, née Arnold, had the misfortune to spend her childhood and adolescence in German-occupied Alsace during Europe's long, black night of social squalor. She observed and endured endless 'defeats' of all that she loved and believed about life as an 'Bibelforscher', or Bible student. Her father was arrested as a dissident in September 1941 and sent to Dachau and on to other concentration camps. She learned to dread the sound of men's boots on the stairs up to the family apartment. In 1943, with her banned religion underground and persecuted, Simone was expelled from grammar school for refusing to embrace Nazi beliefs and practices and spent her formative years in a mindlessly inhumane German 're-education' centre for delinquent girls. Her mother's arrest followed a month later. Her best friend and fellow Bibelforscher, Marcel Sutter, was beheaded that same year for refusing to renounce his faith. No wonder she felt "alone", "isolated", "left out", "tiny", "defenceless", an "outsider", "faint-hearted", sustained only by happy family memories, Bible reading in secret der the commandant's bed, and prayer.