Book Description

Spring, 1944: Maria Herzog is a thirteen-year-old German girl living in Ukraine and praying for the end of World War II. On March 19th, Maria, her father, mother (eight months pregnant), and three younger brothers are put on a small horse-drawn wagon and sent west, along with thousands of other ethnic Germans "liberated" by the retreating Nazi army. Over the next three years, Maria carries her new baby brother in her arms as she trudges alongside the too-small wagon through Romania and Poland, helps her mother protect and feed her four brothers even while she herself must be safe-guarded from soldiers of various armies, survives countless nights in a Berlin air raid shelter, works on a farm in what will become East Germany and, along with her mother and four brothers, is finally reunited with her ex-p.o.w father in what will become West Germany. Multiple, repeated efforts over five years result in Maria and her family coming to the United States, where she can finally leave behind the life of a refugee across half a dozen countries and become an American citizen. She marries a good man and has the opportunity to raise her own children and grandchildren in the peace and freedom denied to her for the fi rst twenty years of life. This is the first-person narrative of Maria Herzog McKeirnan, now 86 years old, and the story of thousands of others like her who survived a communist regime and German occupation in Ukraine, a harrowing 1,500 mile trek through war-ravaged Europe, and countless dangers, as she and her family found various temporary shelters in the midst of the raging storms that were her daily experience of life. Her story is a tribute to the importance of hope and to the resilience of the human spirit in the midst of violence and the seemingly inevitable destruction of civilization. Anyone who is interested in the power of family and its role in human survival will find this story to be interesting, inspiring and restorative.