A GERMAN TALE: A Girl Surviving Hitler's Legacy

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. (Nov.)