Winter 1942. The careless childhood of the Roma girl Sofia has just come to an early end. Before the war, she and her parents and siblings roamed Poland, earning a living in traditional occupations such as trapping and horse trading, but now they are forced to hide from the Nazis in the forests around Warsaw. When a local denounces them, the family of six after all ends up behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Sophie's left arm is disfigured by the tattooed number Z-4515, she loses her name and soon all her loved ones... An autobiographical account of Sofia Taikon, who escaped the Holocaust, lived to see the end of World War II, and afterwards found safety and eventually personal happiness in Sweden.
This impressive Czech-Romany comic book adaptation presents a unique testimony for adults and older children's readers. The original Swedish-Calderash edition from 2006 won the prestigious Artists against Nazism award.


Sofia Taikon (1931-2005), from a Polish Roma family, was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1942 with her family of six. She was the only survivor of the Holocaust. After the war, she married a Calderash Roma in Sweden and became a respected Roma personality. For three years, she gradually revealed her personal story to Gunilla Lundgren, but she did not live to see the book published; she died a few months before its publication.


Gunilla Lundgren (b. 1942), one of the driving forces in the support and promotion of Roma literature in Sweden, was a writer, co-author, editor and winner of several awards for her work for children. Several of her books have been written in collaboration with Roma authors, whose life stories she has made accessible to Swedish readers and thus established a tradition of a specific branch of Roma writing in Sweden.


Amanda Eriksson (1970) is a Swedish author and illustrator who has contributed artwork to many books, many of which are aimed at children's readers. She has also written and illustrated several children's titles herself. She has collaborated with Gunilla Lundgren as an illustrator on the publication of three books by Romani authors.