Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship
Lieff weaves her mother’s letters and reminiscences into a compelling portrait of a young German girl’s WWII–era experiences. As a noncombatant, Margarete Dos witnessed Hitler’s rise to power and weathered the brutality of life on the homefront as she moved from adolescence to young womanhood. Her extraordinary journey did not end with Germany’s surrender, for as she and her mother attempted to immigrate to Sweden at the conclusion of the war, the train they boarded was diverted to Russia, where they spent several years as inmates in a Russian gulag. Since Dos shares her life and loves via intimate interviews with her daughter, an emotionally sympathetic portrait emerges. Though one might validly wonder whether Margarete’s claim that “she didn’t learn about what happened to the Jews in Germany until after the war was over” is entirely true, her eyewitness account, that of a teenager enduring the horrors and the uncertainty of war, can’t be discounted. --Margaret Flanagan