Marie Jalowicz Simon was a “U-boat” — the name given to those enemies of the nazis, mainly Jews, who went underground rather than face the mechanised death of the concentration camps.

Her clear-eyed memoir, after a brief description of early childhood and family circumstances, moves on to her time as a forced labourer in the Spandau factory of the Siemens company.

Establishing a theme that runs throughout this extraordinary account, wonderfully translated by Anthea Bell, Simon recalls not only her own will to survive but the collective spirit of solidarity and resistance of those facing humiliation, exposure and death.

Paid a lowly piece-rate, the women contrived to ensure that the jobs were fairly shared out so that all received the basic, albeit miserly, wage.

A significant number of the male non-Jewish tool setters were also sympathetic and helped the female labourers in their small but precise acts of sabotage, as well as protecting them from the sadistic attentions of committed nazis.

Many of them were secret communists and socialists, whose detestation of the regime impelled them to extraordinary acts of solidarity.

It was this group who provided many of the refuges for Marie when she went on the run, as the nazi authorities aimed to make Berlin “Judenrein” — cleansed of Jews.

Yet there were other Berliners whose motives were less heroic. Simon provides a nerve-shredding account of betrayals, near-discoveries and a young woman’s absolute determination to survive, even if it meant swapping sexual favours for temporary security.

As startling and as moving as her testimony is the afterword crafted by her son, Herman. In a few pages he recounts how his mother’s indomitable honesty extended into every aspect of her “liberated” life after 1945.

In recording her memoirs, she refused to employ anything other than her own subjective experiences, eschewing any narrow academic objectivity with the words “the frog ought not to act as if it could fly and see things from an eagle’s point of view.”

Remaining in Berlin, she could see at first hand the almost deliberately ineffectual denazification process in what became the Western client part of the city. “What luck that I’m living in the Russian zone!” she exclaims.

Gone to Ground is a more frightening and uplifting account than books such as Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, not least because it is uncompromisingly placed within the desperate and fearful perspective of the hunted themselves.