First published 2012
Edith Hahn speaks out against the Nazi regime in Vienna until the Gestapo tears her from her home. They force her into a ghetto, then ship her to a slave labor camp. When she escapes back to Vienna months later, she knows the authorities will hunt her down. A Christian friend helps her disappear underground and resurface in Munich with a new identity as Grete Denner. There she meets Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who falls in love with her. She tells him the truth about being Jewish, but he marries her anyway and protects her secret. Edith lives in constant terror that someone will discover who she really is. German officials question her family background. During childbirth, she refuses pain medication because she fears revealing her past while drugged. When the Soviets capture her husband and bomb her house, she must hide from drunken Russian soldiers attacking women in the streets. Through it all, Edith documents her survival with photographs and papers that now sit in the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, jewish
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Vienna, Munich
Period: World War II
336 pages · Kindle Edition · William Morrow
Content warnings: abuse, violence