I Am Germany by Michael Witt Review!

 

Three years before the Holocaust came the first holocaust, the one that nobody hears about. It stole the lives of thousands of children.

In 1930s Germany, before the war, Anna Himmel was Henry Schultz's secret first love and a child-prodigy violinist lauded as the embodiment of German high art and culture. But when the issue of reunification draws a grieving, widowed Henry back to Germany in 1989, decades after his family fled the growing Nazi threat, she is a shell of who she once was. As Anna reluctantly shares her story of trying to save a disabled little girl at Hartheim Castle, a covert Nazi euthanasia site, Henry starts to realize the insidiousness of the evils he left behind and the consequences of trying to forget.

But she cannot bear to give voice to the end of the story. To answer once and for all the question of how normal people slip piecemeal into evil and whether Anna can ever reunify with who she once was, Henry sets out to Hartheim to find the ending himself. What he discovers there will change them both forever.

Michael Witt

I am a former attorney (please don't hold it against me) who took an audacious plunge and quit the law, deciding to become an unpublished novelist. My first novel, I AM GERMANY, won the "Highly Recommended" award two months after publication. I never try to impose my views on the reader but rather make her come to her own conclusions. I love to write and manipulate words.

My Thoughts

I Am Germany by Michael Witt is a poignant story about Heinrich Schultheiss, who changed his name after coming to America, Henry Schultz, half-Jewish, his early years, and his years as an older man. Anna Himmel, Henry's secret love, before his marriage years. When Henry lived in Germany as a child and Anna lived next door. She was a child prodigy, a violinist.

Henry returns to Germany to find Anna, he does but after 50 years, she is not who he thought he would find. She has a secret. He had left Germany with his parents in 1936 just 16 years old. They moved to Iowa and started a life there away from what was going on in Germany.

The secret she has has torn her life apart, and she reluctantly tells Henry about Hartheim Castle, The building became notorious as one of the centers for the Nazi killing program known as Action T4, in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically killed with poison gas. Henry goes there to find out for himself about what atrocities were exacted on the Jewish people in Germany.

To me, this was a sad story, the horrible things that happened before, during, and after the war, the building of the wall, and the wall being taken down. A very poignant story, a story of a young woman with a talent that surpassed other people, who turned into a broken cynical elderly woman who suffered unspeakable things. In the telling of her story, I think that she was able to come to terms with her younger life.

I think that this is an important book to read about Hartheim Castle, 30.000 people (18.000 people with handicaps and mentally ill people, about 12.000 concentration camp prisoners, and forced laborers) were killed in Hartheim until the end of the year 1944. A book that should be read by everyone interested in the war.

I give this book 5 stars, if I could I would give more.

I received a copy of the book for review purposes.