It's 1944 and Anna's in the Sudetenland, her elder brother is at the front and her younger one is a fanatical member of the Nazi Youth. When she finds an escaped Russian soldier hiding in their barn, nearly dead, humanity conquers fear and she hides him in a disused bunker and continues to feed him despite knowing that if caught she'd be executed as a traitor. She doesn't dare tell even her mother. As the front approaches their village from the east it seems the Russian prisoner will soon be re-united with his comrades - but will Anna's already suspicious brother uncover her guilty secret first and expose her to a traitor's fate, and her family to destruction?

Pausewang's 1995 novel contradicts the popular perception that all Germans were Nazis, and therefore evil, and that all Germans knew of the attrocities being committed in the name of the Fatherland. Anna lives in a remote village where the population is part German, part Czech, the former, in varying degrees, supporting Nazi ideology, the latter equally varied in the degree of their opposition to Hitler's cause. Though her brother Felix accepts the Nazi propoganda unquestioningly, Anna cannot, and she sees each human being for themself, not their race or allegiance. In order to support the Russian, she is forced to live a life of deceit, both at school and at home, and to endanger her family relationship with her brother, and the safety of the extended family. Although the physical travelling is limited and repetitive,Treason could be regarded as a Bildungsroman, Anna developing from child to adult through a traumatic maturation engendered by the elective isolation inflicted by her actions. Her dilemma is searingly portrayed, and is painfully obvious to readers: the views of the fervent Nazis in the village, including her uncle, are pitted against those of her grandmother, whose religious beliefs cannot allow her to supplant God by Hitler, and her weekday landlady, whose assistance in providing for the Russian supports and confirms Anna's action, but at the same time puts them both in great danger. Constantly questioning the individual's role, the novel's dreadful denouement underlines the futility of war. An incredibly moving book which will draw readers into Anna's agonised decision making, and provoke much discussion contibutory to PSHE, considering instinct versus ideology, religion and WWII history at Key Stage 3 and above.