Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Straightforward Insights into a Catastrophic Chapter of European History, October 5, 2007
Liane Guddat was a pre-teen girl living happily with her family in Insterburg, East Prussia, during the last two years of the Second World War. Most of East Prussia was beyond the range of Allied bombers based in England until 1944.
By then even rural areas of the eastern Reich found themselves hit hard by strategic bombers as the Allies softened up East Prussia for the Red Army's planned invasion. Liane was unaware of these changing strategic realities. A devoted Christian like the rest of her family, she knew only that the newest members of her church and their home had vanished into a large bomb crater and that she seemed to spend more nights huddling in cold, dark underground shelters.
Despite the assurances from Nazi leaders that "no enemy would ever set foot on East Prussian soil," her mother heard rumors of the Red Army's first penetration into the Reich. A small town near Insterburg called Nemmersdorf had been occupied briefly. Before it could be retaken by the Wehrmacht, Liane's mother learned that "all the men, women and children had been murdered."
Worse, "all the women and young girls, down to the age of eight [even younger than Liane], were first raped and [then] nailed to barn doors, naked." Liane and the rest of her family moved to Lippehne, a beautiful, small town a few miles from Berlin where an uncle lived.
Eventually, the Red Army took Lippehne too and Liane and her family struggled to survive. She credits God with her survival and draws her inspiration for the title from Psalm 91:7,9, in which the Lord is identified as "my refuge."
In addition to being a memoir, it is clear that the author intends the book to be a witness to God's greatness and mercy. Some readers don't like being preached to, but I didn't find the author's piety to be at all distracting.
A lot of East Prussians were pious, devout Christians and the author's descriptions of the catastrophes she survived are straightforward and accurate insofar as I can determine. She doesn't demonize the Russians, or anybody else, nor does she sugar coat the actions by the fanatic Nazis her family encountered. Instead, she tries to recount what she experienced and it fits in with other accounts by other survivors.
I gave the book five stars because it is straightforward, easy to read and describes an important chapter in European history without grinding any political axes. If you are interested in European History, East Prussia, the Red Army's offensive into the Third Reich or the ordeals to which displaced people were subjected as World War II ended, this is a worthwhile book by someone who was there.
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by Liane I Brown
