I was full of emotions and in a hurry to press “publish,” but now I want to go back to that post.
After I published it, I received an email from a friend in which she related to me how difficult it was for her to accept the uncomfortable truth about the actions of the Soviet Army troops during the March to Berlin when she read this book. This was not the case for me: in recent years, I read enough fiction and documentary on that topic. However, the point of view of an ethnic German who hates Hitler and the Nazis but still joins their convoy to escape the worse evil was complete news, exposing many facts I was not aware of before.
The most interesting is that all these facts are just mentioned, they are not in the center of the story the author tells us. Instead, they are just the background for a truly amazing story of survival, but somehow, and possibly precisely because of that, they are even more convincing.
Another important thing that resonated with me was the evolution of people’s minds after the Germans were defeated. Whenever I think about what will come out of Russia as a result of the current war and what could be a “fix to the world.” Each time I discuss this topic with Boris, he points out that the German government after WWII was dissolved, and the country was functioning under the Allies’ supervision, and that’s what laid the foundation for the eradication of nazism. What I found interesting in this book was how people adapted their beliefs depending on which occupation zone they ended up in. Not everybody strived out of the Russia-occupied zone as Emil Martel did; many people opted to stay with the “known evil” and didn’t want to move to the West even later when they had safer opportunities.
Hettie's Reflections 