Overview

""Gretel's Story"" is the spellbinding account of a free-spirited young woman in a world where few dared to speak up. Living in Hamburg, Germany, Gretel Wachtel witnessed the disappearance of her best friend during Kristallnacht, the infamous night of atrocities against the Jewish population in 1938, and during the war she endured the constant bombing of her beloved city by the Allies, surviving a firestorm. An unguarded anti-Nazi comment resulted in her being forced to work in an ammunition factory, but she didn't lose her desire to fight the totalitarian regime. She married a resistance fighter, helped a priest to protect those hunted by the Gestapo, and hid her Jewish doctor in her home. She passed secrets to the resistance. Finally arrested in 1945 and taken to an internment camp, she was liberated as the British Army advanced towards Hamburg. Gretel Wachtel was an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances, one whose wartime experiences are nothing short of astonishing.

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9780762764136

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Gretel's Story reads like a novel... but it is also a most interesting history of what happened in Germany during the Third Reich. Wachtel's friendship with high-ranking officers who were anti-Hitler members of the Wehrtmacht, the failed plot to kill Hitler, the tragic British bombing of two vessels containing Jewish camp survivors, and our heroine's machinations with the charming Brits of the occupying force makes for fascinating reading.--Jewish Book World <p><p> Well-written and succinct...[Gretel Wachtel's] defiance of the Gestapo and her willingness to serve time in a concentration camp gives Ms. Wachtel special status, similar to others like Oskar Schindler. -- New York Journal of Books

Author Information

Gretel Wachtel was born in Germany in 1915 and was twenty-four years old when the Second World War began. She moved to England in 1945, where she remained until her death in 2005. Claudia Strachan was born in Germany and in 1993 she moved to England, where she met Gretel. She spent the next nine years researching Gretel's story.

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