This book drags us like a whirlwind, introducing us to a moment in history that seems far away, a time that we like to describe blandly and nebulously as "the zero hour": Europe, in the years when people lived in holes and between debris, a time when nobody was able to imagine a future for the continent. The appearance of our continent at the end of World War II is something that you can not imagine those who were born after, no novel is able to reproduce the unimaginable of those years. The clearest images have been provided by the authors who followed the armies of the Allies, the best reporters in America, and later the neutrals, "outsiders" who came from countries not affected by the war and did not believe their eyes. H.M. Enzensberger compiled the accounts of these exceptional eyewitnesses between 1944 and 1948: journalists such as Martha Gelborn, Edmund Wilson or Janet Fanner, and writers such as Max Frisch or the Swedish Stig Dagerman. Written under the direct impression of horror, the scenes they transmitted to us are brutal and eccentric, terrifying and moving, like those that today come from the so-called Third World.