This book, the portuguese translation of the german original Das Brennglas, is a rare first hand testimony of the life of a german gipsy under the Nazi regime. The author, born in 1927, was not only very young at the time of the events he describes, but was also quite poor and had only had a very basic education. So this book is certainly not a kind of a gipsy Klemperer Diaries. Nevertheless it is a moving portrait of the life of a gipsy child and youth under the nazis, as he remembers it some five decades later. A life in an environment ever more thight and repressive; his emprisionment and deportation to Auschwitz in 1943; the life in the camp; the transfer to other camps in the final stages of the war, and a brief description of the imediate post-war years, with "the nazis seated behind the same desks where they had been seated before" (pg 115). Very short (126 pages) and with some twenty photographs, this book helps bring to the fore an almost forgotten aspect of the holocaust that should be more often remembered. ( )