From Publishers Weekly
Karres offers a brutal account of life in Germany during and after WWII, in a candid, unsparing voice. Her father, Hans, is drafted by the Nazis as the allied forces gain ground. Suspicious of the bunkers the Nazis have prepared for women and children, her mother, Barbara, flees northeast Germany, walking to Bavaria with two suitcases, three small children and a sickly, crippled baby (the author) in her arms. Fearing the baby will not survive, she gets her christened on the run. Life becomes even worse in Bavaria. Living in a crumbling, unheated house belonging to Hans's family, they face starvation, filth, cold and disease, but learn that those who stayed behind died in one of the most devastating air raids on Germany. At the war's end, Hans comes to Bavaria from the front; shortly thereafter the author's mother dies from blood clots in her legs. Her father marries a local woman, Julie, who keeps the family together but seems incapable of love. They live for years on the brink of starvation. This relentlessly bleak, horrifying story details a common phenomenon in postwar Germany: viewed as pariahs by the larger world, Eri's father and many other Germans, and Eri herself as she becomes a teenager, hate what their country did to the Jews, and hate themselves and each other for not resisting. Eri comes to feel she must leave Germany or die. In her late teens she meets an American soldier and in 1961 marries him, leaving her devastated country for the U.S. Though readers will flinch often at this graphic account, the affecting prose will keep them transfixed.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Karres, who was born in Magdeburg, Germany, two weeks after Germany's September 1939 invasion of Poland, begins her graphic memoir with an account of her and her mother, brother, and two sisters fleeing hundreds of miles across Germany looking for a place safe from Allied bombing. Later, her mother died and her father--back from the war--tried to find enough food to keep them alive. They set out on another laborious journey, sleeping in barns or in farmers' fields. When they finally reached the safety of their grandmother's house in Bavaria, French soldiers took over the rooms and the small amount of food that was available. Still later, Karres' father remarried a woman with children of her own. Karres, a Christian, describes how--in the postwar years--the family was desperately poor, begging for food. But now there is "no sign there's ever been a war here. . . . It's as if Dachau was just a brief nightmare."
George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
