2022-02-17
A memoir focuses on war, loss, family dysfunction, and survival.
Stephenson, who lived in Hamburg, Germany, was only 6 years old when Allied bombs destroyed the city in 1943 during World War II. After she was extracted from a damaged air-raid shelter, she found the body of her mother lying on the street. Her identical “mirror twin,” Evi, and the girls’ older sister, Kristen, were missing. The author was rescued by a kindly woman who found her seriously wounded. The woman lovingly cared for the child for four months until Stephenson’s father returned from the battlefield to find and reclaim her. Father and daughter took the train to her grandmother’s house in Muehlhausen, a border town between Germany and France. Then he set out to find her sisters. He came back with Kristen, but Evi remained missing. To this day, the loss of Evi defines the author’s greatest sorrow. Her father returned to the battlefield, and Stephenson and Kristen were cared for by his sister, whose husband was also away at war. When the border town became too dangerous, the author’s aunt took the two girls to a town on the Danish border, where they moved into a two-room farmhouse until the return of Stephenson’s uncle at war’s end. The makeshift family of four moved to Hamburg. But the author’s father would not return until fall 1948. The narrative’s most engaging vignettes appear in Stephenson’s graphic descriptions of everyday life in war-torn Germany during and immediately after the conflict. But the recurring thread of the memoir is the painful exploration of the psychological scars she suffered during those traumatic years of loss and surprising family crises that resulted in debilitating PTSD later in life, after she moved to Australia. Her prose is touching and vivid throughout the story. But the book would have benefited from a strong editor to correct unnecessarily confusing errors in dates and ages, as when the author recalls the winter of 1947-1948 and describes Kristen as being “twelve and a half.” Soon after, Stephenson refers to Kristen’s 15th birthday in March 1948.
An emotionally charged, historically informative European homefront recollection.
