Trees in the Snow

Eva Smiller was fifteen years old and living in a small town in North-Western Ukraine (then, a part of the Soviet Union), when the area was overrun by Hitler's armies. In the following months, the town's Jewish population of about fifteen hundred people was executed, including Eva's family, but she managed to survive. For the next few years, she wandered under an assumed name over the Nazi-occupied Ukrainian territory, starved, almost froze to death, a few times was arrested as a suspected Jew, miraculously escaped execution, and eventually ended up in Nazi Germany's Berlin, where she worked at a restaurant and lived with the family of its owners. After the war, she remained in Germany for two more years, working as a translator in the Soviet Military Administration, then returned to the Soviet Union. Her fascinating account of that journey is presented in this title's first part (book). The title also includes the second part (book), narrated by Michael Lehrman, which brings the tale into more recent times. It describes the postwar Soviet Union, Eva's visit to her hometown thirty years later, emigration to the United States, meeting with the American relatives, and life in the New World. The second part completes Eva's life story within a broad historical context.