A Long Silence: Memories of a German Refugee Child, 1941-1958

[Sequoia]

by Sabina De Werth Neu


From Publishers Weekly
In her first book, De Werth Neu, a retired therapist born in "Berlin, Nazi Germany" at the start of WWII, recounts her nightmarish experiences as a refugee child from her native land. Forced from home as part of Hitler's efforts to strengthen the Eastern front, de Werth Neu, along with her mother and two sisters, endured countless relocations, assault and rape by Russian soldiers, never-ending hunger, and a horrific train ride during which babies died and toilet buckets overflowed into the crammed cars; "we were the lucky ones," she points out, "no one was trying to exterminate us."

amazon.com

There's many books about the Holocust which we are all know about but this one is about a little German child cute as a bug who endured her own sort of hell and had some happy times too. I put all my other books aside to read this one straight through. It was amazingly wonderful.

[RZM]

1. There's a growing body of historical literature about this

Millions of people were moved around after the second world war . . . mostly ethnic Germans (roughly 12 million of them). Add them to the millions more moved around in Europe before that, including the Armenians, Greeks and Turks, and all manner of people in the Soviet Union . . . and then there's the holocaust and all of the population transfers the Germans carried out during the war. Historians will still be busy with all of this for generations to come.

[Cleita]

2. Seems like it would be a good and sobering read.

I knew a Dutch girl born the same year in Indonesia, who was rounded up with her mother, sister and other Dutch women and children and forced on a march to a concentration camp run by the imperialist Japanese during WWII. She was there for the duration of the war and had many vivid memories of the suffering and cruelty they were subjected to while incarcerated, which she shared with me. She never wrote a book but should have. Although, I was the same age during the war, and the war did affect us, my childhood war experience was quite different to hers, where she faced death from disease, starvation and worse on a daily basis. Maybe writers need to encourage victims of these experiences of war who were women and children to tell their story. Mostly, we hear about the combat experiences of the soldiers who fought in these wars and seldom those of the civilian women and children victims.