★★★☆☆ Dickensian story of an American girl trapped in Germany

Queen of the Bremen

Marlies Adams DiFante, Ann Marie DiFante

I received Queen of the Bremen: The True Story Of An American Child Trapped In Germany During World War II as a Christmas present from my nephew. I suppose he must have gotten it in a used book store somewhere. It's a self-published memoire of an American woman, Marlies Adams DiFante (recorded by her daughter-in-law Ann Marie DiFante) telling the story of how she was trapped in Germany with her family for seven years during World War II. Her father, John Adams, emigrated from Germany to the USA, where he started a family and became a citizen. In 1939 his wife (also German-American) received a letter informing her that her father was dying. John Adams obeyed the summons to his wife's father's deathbed -- taking his son, Peter, and daughter, Marlies, (six and five years old) and his pregnant wife to Germany. It was terrible timing. Hitler had recently come to power. He invaded Poland, starting World War II. Germany closed its ports, trapping the Adams family in Germany for the duration of the war.

It was terribly difficult. Not being German citizens, the Adams family received even less than the starvation rations German families got. Allied bombers meanwhile reduced every German town to rubble, including the one in which the Adams's lived, with much loss of civilian life.

Rationing difficulties forced the Adams family to separate for a time. Marlies went to live with her Aunt Lena. Lena was a Nazi informer who wanted Marlies only for the sake of her ration tickets. She abused Marlies -- this part of the story is difficult to read. It will remind readers of the privations suffered by the boys of Charles Dickens's novels. Indeed, it made me realize that, bitter and painful as the sufferings of the heroes of Dickens novels are, they are sanitized.

It's not a gentle story. The pain of the story is lessened by the reader's knowledge that Marlies Adams survived to write this memoire. Even when the Allies reached Germany, the sufferings of the Adams family were not ended. If you like to think of the troops who fought the Nazis as Good Guys, this memoire will give you some hard moments.

It will be fairly obvious to any experienced reader that no one involved in the production of this book was a professional. Marlies Adams DiFante and Ann Marie DiFante are not Dickens, and you will quickly realize that the text has never passed through the hands of a professional copy editor. (Grammatical errors are minor, and never affect comprehension.) Still, this authentic memoire showed me sides of the war I had never read elsewhere.

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