My Wounded Heart

"From her idealistic youth until the end of her life, Lilli Jahn was a prolific letter writer. A resourceful and strong-minded young woman, she studied medicine in Cologne and in her letters discussed theater, music, literature, art, and religion. She wooed and won her Protestant friend and fellow medical student, Ernst Jahn, by letter, and in 1926 she married him. Together they set up house and a medical practice and started a family." "But in 1933, when Hitler took power, everything changed. Ernst Jahn came under increasing pressure from the local Nazis to divorce his Jewish wife, which he did in 1942. From that moment Lilli and her five children were left unprotected. Arrested and sent to the Breitenau labor camp, Lilli was angry and afraid, but she could at least write and receive letters. Miraculously, almost all her letters to her children and friends have survived, together with many of theirs to her that were smuggled out of Breitenau as Lilli realized she would be sent to perish at Auschwitz." "In these letters, and in the narrative by Martin Doerry, Lilli's grandson, we see the deterioration of Germany under National Socialism through the eyes of an ordinary family. We watch as Lilli's initial optimism begins to crack, and as she tries to run the household and mother her children from a labor camp far away, relying on her twelve-year-old daughter Ilse. Perhaps most movingly of all, we see the children's heroic attempts to save their mother, and their struggle to continue to believe in her return."--BOOK JACKET.