In ["The Ark,"] one of the first books for young people to come out of post-war Germany, we meet the Lechow family, refugees from the East Zone….

The setting is unusual and interesting. But the best part of the book deals with the birth, death and care of the animals on the farm, described with knowledge and affection. The story is handled rather amateurishly, with too many characters seen from too many points of view, so that the reader is sometimes confused, and the effect is scattered. Moreover there is constant self-pity and a feeling of a world too small and isolated. Apparently all these people have been living in a political vacuum, where no one of them has ever felt sympathy for the Nazis (who are never mentioned); there is something—to this adult reader, at least—disingenuous about the picture.