"A Private Treason" is the memoir of a courageous German woman who,
as a girl of nineteen from an upper-middle-class Gentile family,
rejected Nazism completely and gave up her language and her country
forever. Branded a "traitor," she fled from the blitzkrieg to
Vienna, the Dalmation islands, Paris, finally to the "zone libre"
in southern France--a fugitive's life preserved by forged identity
papers and haunted by the fear of detention and arrest. Yet she
managed to survive.
Now, she looks back on the war and her youth. Her intense, personal
memories are recalled in fragments--she tells each one honestly and
with powerful emotion, including her childhood in Berlin and the
liberation of France in 1944. She recalls her neighborhood amid
Berlin's plentiful parks and lakes and as she matures, we see her
first perceptions of the ominous moods and events beginning to
shake Germany--the deep resentment over losing World War I, the
vicious gossip of "hereditary enemies," the first outburst of
political and racial violence that would eventually be transformed
into hobnailed boots, truncheons, and swastika armbands, separating
her from schoolmates and playmates forever.
"A Private Treason" is filled with poignant recollections of the
people in her life: her strict, deeply Teutonic grandfather--target
of her childhood rebellions with his haughty refinement and
tyrannical whims--who finally expresses his love openly just before
she leaves Germany; her gentle, withdrawn father and talented,
emotionally unstable mother; Loirette, a clever, myopic Vichy
official secretly working for the Resistance; and Andre, her
intellectual lover, continually frustrated in his attempts to work
effectively for the maquis.
Much of "A Private Treason" tells the story of Ingrid and Andre's
struggle to stay alive and together, of their separations and
reunions, of her transporting forged papers for the maquis and his
plotting to escape to England, of the enormous risks they both took
to hide their comrades and condemned refugees, and of their hope,
finally fulfilled, for the Allied invasion that would eventually
drive the Germans out of France. A few days after the invasion
begins, Andre is killed in one of the last military actions in the
Vercors.
In its story of suffering and personal grief, "A Private Treason"
denounces all wars. Yet, at the same time, Ingrid Greenburger's
strength and natural exuberance shine throughout this stirring
account of one woman's response to the outrages of war and Nazism.
The late Igrid Greenburger was the widow of literary agent Sanford
Greenburger.
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