The Enchanted Suitcase

<p>Unexpectedly finding her German father's World War II memoirs in an old suitcase transports author Helga Warren to romantic Paris in wartime surrender from inside a German bunker on the beaches of Normandy behind the barbed wire of a prisoner of war camp in Aliceville Alabama and on to the start of a new life in America.</p><p>The author discovers a man full of enthusiasm and the fervor of youth-and a marvelous writer-revealing unseen sides of the father she thought she knew. A whole new world opens up all because of a sheaf of tattered papers in the bottom of what can only be called an enchanted suitcase.</p><p>One of the few eyewitness accounts of the little-known history of German prisoners of war in America during World War II Karlheinz Stoess's story gives us a glimpse into the life of what was known as a Scheuerfrau or scrubwoman of the Wehrmacht-an ordinary German soldier at the crossroads of history.</p>