On the banks of the River Bečva, the Czech town of Přerov, with a population of 150,000, lies 40 miles north-east of the Moravian capital, Brno, and 150 miles south-east of Prague, the capital of Bohemia. With the coming of the railway to the town in 1841, it soon became a notable regional commercial centre, supported by an important agricultural industry, brewing and engineering. From 1918, Moravia and Bohemia, though part of the newly independent Republic of Czechoslovakia, retained distinct cultural variations from the time when they were semi-autonomous regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For Czechoslovakia's 356,830 Jews, independence brought with it total emancipation from any vestiges of restrictions under the Empire. The period from then until the German occupation of 1939 was a golden age for that community, although rapid assimilation, a low birth-rate and emigration resulted in decreasing numbers.

One hundred miles away, the coal mine of Fürstengrube is situated near the city of Mysłowice, in the southern Polish region of Silesia. It, too, once had a Jewish population. But unlike those who thrived in Přerov, the Jews in Fürstengrube were slave-labourers, prisoners and victims of Hitler's so-called Final Solution.

It was in Fürstengrube that Gideon Klein was murdered by the SS on 27 January 1945, little more than 25 years after his birth in 1919. What follows is not only Klein's own story but also that of a tenacious family caught up in world events that were spiralling out of control. It is also about Jewish communities destroyed by the most deranged and murderous regime in history, and about the fragility of life and environment.

We live in a world of fake news. Holocaust deniers, whether ignorant, racist individuals, or cruel, totalitarian regimes, usually espouse hate speech, and they have confidence that they can prosper on verbal and, alas, physical thuggery. In a similar way, the Nazis intended the names of individuals like Klein to be obliterated from history. But this book, and the testimony within it, aims to thwart these deniers and the other heirs of the Nazis. Perhaps what follows can go some way towards restoring the memory and legacy of Gideon Klein, and the other six million victims of Hitler's madness.