I don't think I will ever be able to forget this book. It is so painfully intimate and stunning and heartbreaking. The author pieced together from historical sources the story of her distant relative who was involved in the German resistance to the rise of Hitler. The book in such a powerful way shows us how unbelievably fast Hitler rose and how unbelievably cruel the world became under him. There is the story of how hard it was for the people in the resistance to get the outside world to listen and to act. The bravery of the people doing any small part possible. The undermining and spies all around them. The world needs to understand what happened and how it could happen again. Truly an astonishing read.Publisher description:
Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now. Harnack's great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors' testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.