Documentary history or gripping literature? One Life is both. Lampert's reconstruction of the lives of eight real people in Nazi Germany explores the difficult choices faced by a wide range of individuals. Among them is Miriam P., a juvenile delinquent who finds herself on a path to the gas chamber. And then there is the rabid Nazi Wihelm K., who assumes the position of commissioner general in White Ruthenia only to fight for the lives of Jews in the Minsk ghetto; a retiree who is sentenced to death for scribbling a few words of anti-Hitler graffiti in a public toilet; and a family man turned SS murderer. As the stories of people on both sides of the terrible rift unfold, their interconnected lives branch out in astonishing patterns, shaped by the logic of racism as well as by accidents and coincidences. Based on exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Lampert's stories re-create the horrors and terrible choices of that time in a way no conventional history could.