When Edith Hofmann sat down to write this book, she was a
19-year-old coming to terms with the fact of her own survival. It
is a story which describes a struggle; the struggle to come to
terms with a haunting past, the struggle to survive, and the
struggle to unburden a broken heart. It also embodies a struggle to
form, in language, that which at times all but defies linguistic
form. When Hofmann started writing this book she had only been
speaking English for two years, and yet she wanted to convey her
experiences, in English, to those with whom she had made her home.
The cruel reality was that no one really wanted to hear. She poured
out her soul, only to be told that 'no one was interested in the
war any more'. This was 1950. Some fifty years later she revisited
the manuscript, wondering whether such a text would have any value.
For fifty years her text had lain in her drawer, waiting to be
read. Her story is a novel, but it certainly is not a fiction.
Scared for her own safety, Hofmann chose to write in the third
person rather than pen a memoir. Every page is bound up with the
intricate details of her life, those whom she loved, and those whom
she lost; the echoes of those terrible years, and the memory they
imposed. In compiling this text, she decided neither to change it,
by removing discrepancies or updating anything, which Hofmann wrote
in the late 1940s, nor to improve her English, but rather to leave
it as a raw and indelible testimony not only to her survival but to
her bid to survive survival. You will be moved; not only by what
she has written, but by the fact that she wrote at all.
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