Good-bye to the Mermaids: A Childhood Lost in Hitler's Berlin

At the opening of this rich, descriptive memoir of WWII Berlin, Finell writes of the mermaids whose souls, according to legend, are the foam of the ocean she loved. Thus, the title evokes the childhood that was lost to the war, and equally the childlike desire to believe, as the author did, in what Hitler was selling. Most of Finell's family failed to share her belief—her divorced mother, an artist, did not, and her half-Jewish relatives certainly did not. Finell, who was six when the war began, lived through many of the quintessential German wartime situations. She participated in the Hitler Youth and fled her home during the bombing campaign, but much of this territory has been mined by previous writers (like Irmgard Hunt in On Hitler's Mountain ). More compelling here are Finell's descriptions of the war's end and the immediate postwar years, as she deftly depicts the chaos, poverty and hope that coexisted. She also shows how the truth about the Nazis and their actions slowly seeped into her consciousness. This gracefully written memoir adds to our growing understanding of the German experience of the war. (Nov.)