Letters From Berlin

(Paperback)

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Winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography. A vivid recreation of a largely untold side of world war II - the German side. Six years before Margarete died, the author asked her mother to tell her all her stories of life during and just after the Second World War. "If you don't tell, no one will ever know and all those stories, and all that suffering, will go to your grave." Drawing on hundreds of hours of taped interviews with her mother, Kerstin Lieff has recreated Margarete's story from her childhood and her child's eye view of the rise and fall of the Reich through the family's increasingly desperate circumstances as the war's end neared. In the final days, as the Russians moved toward Berlin, there were terrible rumors and fears. With the war's end, Margarete and her mother found themselves on a train, which they believed was headed for freedom, but, instead, after a long, gruelling journey, took them into the heart of Russia, and, finally to a Gulag, where they were to spend two horrible years before finally returning to a Berlin which was no longer home to them. When Kerstin Lieff was going through her German-American mother Margarete's effects, follo

Author Bio

Kerstin Lieff was born in Stockholm, Sweden in the winter of 1952 just after her parents fled their German homeland, most of which still lay in ruin as a result of the recent war.Ten months later the family immigrated to the United States, to St. Paul, Minnesota where she grew up speaking German, often hearing stories about her parents' past.She now lives in Boulder, Colorado where she competes as a triathlete and is studying for her Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Letters From Berlin is her first book.