Book Recommendation

Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman

https://www.amazon.com/Paper-Love-Searching-Grandfather-Behind/dp/1594633975/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1540076045&sr=1-1&keywords=Paper+Love&dpID=516LAiQMTnL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

Sarah Wildman is an American Journalist who comes across a cache of letters in the files of her grandfather, a doctor who fled Austria days after the Anschluss when Hitler and the Nazis took over the country in 1938. A great many of the letters are from Valy, his “true love,” who was left behind. They are love letters and letters pleading for help. Other letters are from relatives and friends seeking help, help that as a nearly-destitute immigrant he was unable to provide. Wildman sets out to trace Valy through the horrors of the Nazi Reich. She is an excellent writer and this is a difficult book to read as it personalizes the immense suffering that took place for Jews and others as the Nazi vice squeezed the life out of them. Wildman pieces together day to day life as best she can, talks with survivors including friends of Valy and the of man she married in 1943, hoping to escape deportation to “The East.” Reading it is wrenching, but it should be read by everyone, lest this terrible history fade away. Knowing it will help generations to come to stand against any return of this immense evil and put to rest the insane dreams of some for a “Fourth Reich.”