Trees in the Snow

The twentieth century was perhaps the most dramatic in the history of humankind. Two world wars, the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and the USSR, technological revolution, and the establishment of the United States as the preeminent world power were the period's hallmarks. It was also the deadliest such stretch (its first half), where accelerating evolutionary trends created vortices of violence that sucked in millions of lives. Among those vortices was the Holocaust, and one of its stories became the foundation of this book. It is a story of a young girl (the name on the front cover) living in a small town in northwestern Ukraine when the area was overrun by Hitler's armies. Within a few months, the town's Jewish population of fifteen hundred people, including the girl's family, was executed, but she escaped the carnage. For the following couple of years, she roamed under an assumed name over the Nazi-occupied territory, starved, slept on the streets and in the forest, several times cheated death, and eventually ended up in Berlin, where she worked in a restaurant and lived with its owners' family until the city's capture by the Red Army. She remained in Germany for two more years, working as a translator, then returned to the Soviet Union. Her striking account of that journey - of death and survival, of cruelty and kindness - is presented in the pages inside. The title also contains a second part (Book II), which adds the perspective of the undersigned to bring the tale into a more recent span. The second book expands the narrative across the continents and time, completing the protagonist's life story against a snapshot of the epoch. - Michael Lehrman -