It soon became apparent that almost everyone was ignoring their just claims. Especially disturbing was the contemptuous way elderly victims of the Nazis were being treated by some of the main Jewish organisations, whose leaders were supposed to be representing their interests, by certain of their lawyers, by greedy historians, and by organs of the State of Israel itself.

There were a few unexpected heroes. I was greatly enriched by the chance to work with the lawyer Anthony Julius, who worked pro bono; the then Times journalists Michael Gove and Daniel Johnson; the legal counsellor at the German Embassy in London, Herr Dobbelstein; Stephan Kramer, a gentile official of the Jewish Claims Conference in Germany who later converted to Judaism; Nina Staehle, a Seventh Day Adventist doctoral student at Oxford; the US archivist Miriam Kleiman and, above all, several wonderful courageous survivors. They were able to withstand obstruction and occasional insults from the German authorities but found it far harder to accept frequent rejection from Jewish authorities.

In the end, the German side offered a token £5,000 compensation to eligible survivors for their slave labour in Auschwitz or in other camps, often covering a period of years. Before they were entitled to receive even this, they were required to sign away their legal rights and to accept that the sum was a goodwill offering rather than an admission of responsibility.

Against this background, why should it matter that Dina Gold was able to secure some £2.7 million for her mother from the German government as her share of the value of their beautiful commercial property in central Berlin expropriated during Hitler’s rule? Why should her family receive several hundred times the amount awarded to a Jewish slave labourer for work and suffering in Auschwitz? Why, for that matter, should we marvel at the success of Los Angeles lawyer Randol Schoenberg (grandson of the composer) in securing the return of Gustav Klimt’s portrait of the Jewish woman Adele Bloch-Bauer (the “Woman in Gold”) to her niece and rightful owner? By the time it was returned by the Austrian authorities in 2006, it was worth $135 million. Is it the reality that the heirs of millionaire Jewish families should be able to secure compensation by employing lawyers willing to work for potentially handsome contingency fees, whereas ordinary Holocaust survivors are left in the cold?

These were unnecessary reservations. What shines through the book is an unusually honest account of a determined quest to vindicate a much-loved grandmother and mother. In the process, Gold does more than many general histories to illustrate the way in which Nazism affected the everyday lives of Jewish families and, in particular, their women. What makes her account real is that she does not avoid showing how persecution brought out the worst as well as the best in its Jewish victims. Sexual infidelity, financial folly, snobbery and even deceit between relatives are part of what actually happened. Such a human toll is too rarely recounted in the stock videoed testimonies of Holocaust survivors which have been collected in recent years. The book is valuable too in illustrating examples of “everyday denial” of their Nazi past and obstruction by some German corporations in their responses to Gold’s inquiries.