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Author Hamer-Hodges arrays a heroine’s experiences that took many harrowing turns but concluded with dignity and truth. Ruth Lindenau enjoyed a charmed early childhood in a village in Prussia (now Poland), but that would change suddenly, darkly, when, as one of the two top students at her school, with remarkable musical abilities, she was transferred to a school where she and her companions were supposed to devote their skills—and loyalties—to Hitler and Nazism. They became student prisoners in a nightmarish institution where academic studies were combined with toils such as kitchen duties and floor scrubbing, and a small infraction by one student could result in sixty-five girls spending the night standing rigidly together outdoors.
As the war raged around them, they and others were deported to Denmark. There, Ruth learned Danish and began working for, and falling in love with, Commander Anderssen, who had become captivated by the teen when she performed in a musical. Later, she would marry Karl and have a daughter, Barbara. But she swore to Karl, with whom she immigrated to the US, that her past life would never be revealed.
Hamer-Hodges—a biographer and an immigrant herself—was introduced to Ruth by a mutual friend. Then a widow in her seventies, the brave survivor opened her heart to the author so that, with personal relics offered to her, Hamer-Hodges was able to empathically convey Ruth’s memories and long-kept secrets, extending this epic to include further fascinating details regarding Ruth’s family members and friends. The book enfolds much world history, offering a new generation of readers a vivid view of the horrors of war as well as a portrait of a courageous woman who, with talent, intelligence, and unsurpassable determination, overcame seemingly insuperable odds and lived to at last tell the tale.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review