It would be easy to write about heros - this book is more subtle

Surprising development in the excellent "Every Man Dies Alone" (Hans Fallada): the jewish widow in the Berlin apartment building dies of an OD of sleeping pills. Very powerful and disturbing - she's sheltered for three days by an elderly judge who lives in her building, and the easy route would be to make the judge a schindler-like hero, make this an adult version of Anne Frank (which Fallada would not have known about anyway, ca 1947 when he wrote the book), but no, he's much more sly and complex, the judge takes her in and sets down a ton of rules - she has to stay in the spare bedroom, never open the shades during the day, never leave the room, never try to contact him - it's worse than a prison, it's like a tomb. He's a hero, taking on a great risk, but he's not a humanitarian, he's almost inhumane - and she practically goes insane, she decides facing her fate in the world - anything - would be better than this shelter-captivity. She timidly emerges, the cleaning lady shoos her back in, and then she takes a fistful of pills, escapes, finds her way back to her looted apartment. The Nazis/Hitler youth family in the building find her there and one sharp-eyed guy notices her shoes are clean and it's been raining out - he figures that someone in the building has sheltered her. Will they figure it out? It's extremely odd that she dies of an OD of pills, as the jacket liner notes that Fallada himself died of an OD of morphine shortly after the war. There's tragedy on many levels of this book.