
Music Behind Barbed Wire: A Diary of Summer 1940
Hans Gal, Anthony Fox and Eva Fox-Gal
Book
The Austrian composer Hans Gal (1890-1987) was one of many Jewish refugees who fled to Britain from...

Destination London: German-speaking Emigres and British Cinema, 1925-1950
Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli
Book
The legacy of emigres in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second...

The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
Book
The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity....
The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two's Unknown Tragedy
Book
The tragedies of World War II are well known. But at least one has been forgotten: in September...

A Sparrow in Terezin
Book
Bound together across time, two women will discover a powerful connection through one survivor's...

The Imposter
Book
The Impostor, by the admired Spanish writer Javier Cercas, is a true story that is nevertheless...

Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
Book
In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it...

Those Who Are Loved
Book
'Victoria Hislop's view of history in her novels is, like the writer herself, a compassionate and...
Historical Fiction Modern Greek History

ClareR (5824 KP) rated Send For Me in Books
Sep 7, 2021
This was a different take on other books set at this time, and I liked that about it very much. I haven’t read many books about those who managed to escape the Nazi regime and immigrate to safe countries before the Holocaust really began. But it’s no less saddening for that. Annalise desperately misses her parents, and life is so utterly different in the US.
The story swaps between Annalise and her granddaughter, Clare, whose life couldn’t have been any more different. Clare has the much more liberated life of an American woman - whether that’s what she really wants, remains to be seen.
I really enjoyed seeing the juxtaposition between a 1930s immigrant and a modern young woman. Annalise’s fear of being in a big city with no English is palpable - I panicked along with her. It must be so scary to move somewhere that’s completely different to your own life experience, and not even have a common language - something that people have always had to endure for their own safety throughout the ages.
This is a really moving novel, made more so when I learnt that the letters between Annalise and her mother Klara were real - just that the names were changed.

Eyewitness to Wehrmacht Atrocities on the Eastern Front: A German Soldier’s Memoir of War and Captivity
Book
How can the truth about the devastating atrocities committed by the German army on the Eastern Front...