The Girl in the War Diary

Ellie found the diary because of a loose brick.

She was sixteen, and she was supposed to be helping her parents clear the cellar of the old house they had just moved into — a tall, narrow house in the old quarter of the town, the kind with crooked stairs and walls a half-metre thick, a house that had stood through the war her history teacher only ever covered in the last rushed week of term. She had been shoving boxes around in the dim when her shoulder knocked the wall and a brick shifted, low in the corner, where the damp had eaten the mortar. Behind it was a cavity, and in the cavity, wrapped in a square of oilcloth gone stiff with age, was a small book with a cracked cover, its pages swollen and brown at the edges, covered in a careful, slanting handwriting in faded ink.

The first date was October 1943. The last was August 1944. And the name on the inside cover, written in a girl's deliberate, hopeful hand, was Mirjam.