Cordelia Edvardson was born in 1929 in Berlin as the illegitimate daughter of the German writer Elisabeth Langgasser and an unidentified Jewish father. Langgasser was a well-known German Catholic writer whom the Nazis considered Jewish. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is the harrowing account of how she was summoned to Gestapo headquarters in 1943, separated from her half-Jewish siblings, and sent alone to Auschwitz despite the desperate efforts of her German stepfather. Near the end of the war she was rescued from a labor camp in northern Germany by the Danish Red Cross and transported to Sweden. Edvardson’s 1984 study, the second part of which is excerpted, is considered one of the most powerful of all memoirs of the Shoah and among the most penetrating analyses of the heart of Nazi evil. After marrying and having children in Sweden, she moved to Jerusalem, where she has been the Middle East correspondent for Svenska Dagbladet ever since. In December 2001 she was presented with the Royal Prize of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm and celebrated at her summer house outside the Swedish capital.