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 countrys 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-Browns 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.