Publisher's Synopsis
It's 1939 and Anna Brandt is eighteen years old. Relationships between Germans and Jews are outlawed. Anna and the man she loves are committing the crime of race defilement. When Anna is forced to flee the home of her father, a Nazi sympathizer, she takes refuge in a bakery owned by a Resistance member. Soon Anna is making pastries for the officers of nearby Buchenwald while also making special deliveries,' risking death to bring bread to the camp's inmates. Then she is noticed by one of Buchenwald's highest-ranking Nazi officers. And everything changes. Five decades later, Anna has emigrated to Minnesota. She still refuses to speak of her wartime experiences. Anna's daughter Trudy has only one clue as to what they might have been - a family photograph featuring Anna, Trudy and the Nazi officer. Haunted by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins a deeper investigation of the past and not only finds a chance for redemption but unearths the heartbreaking secret her mother has kept for fifty years. This beautifully written first novel is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive, and the legacy of shame.
