Daughter of the Enemy

A child is born in a time of war and, when she is five years old, her father, a soldier in the German Wehrmacht, is killed in battle. Not until that child is grown will she understand the full horror of her country's role in that war. Then begins a long and painful reckoning, a quest for identity and a way to remember a father beloved but nevertheless on the wrong side of history. Marie Pal-Brown's moving and beautifully written memoir faces, without flinching, the complexity of that reckoning. Daughter of the Enemy is both a personal and social history--it recounts how a ravaged people survived the hardships of WWII and postwar Germany and succumbed to the silence surrounding the Holocaust. It weaves, from the frayed strands of memory, a fully human accounting of coming to terms with hard truths, finally creating a tender memorial to the father lost in war. This is a journey, and the journey is a story that has been waiting to be told.