Historians of the Holocaust have established sharp categories: perpetrator, victim, and bystander. Philosophers have introduced nuance, perhaps even confusion, by describing the grey zone, that zone in between black and white, fully good and fully bad. One of the attractions to the Holocaust is that the perpetrators appear as evil incarnate, radical evil mass murderers, demonic, sadistic and the victims appear innocent, victimized not because of what they did, but by the accident of their birth as Jews. A Flower Grows is a novel about the grey zone, the world of the in between.