I am a novice when it comes to what went on in Germany around WWII - reading Walls, gave me a bit of understanding, it was not detailed, but enough to see how one man thought he could dominate the world and infiltrate his wicked thoughts in other humans. Great book of how one woman conquered Germany!

I am a Lutheran church librarian who was given this book as a donation to our library from a parishioner's teenage daughter who was assigned to read it in school. This is an excellent book about resisting Naziism by a German woman who risked her life to help others. The interesting thing about this woman's story is that she treaded such a fine line. She was not a member of the Nazi party. She expected to be found out and killed at any moment. Time and again she underwent Gestapo questioning for no reason other than to scare her. Even so, her degree in Scandinavian languages gave her a certain amount of power and prestige within the Nazi system that allowed her to give food, medicine and religious support to Scandinavian political prisoners imprisoned all over Germany. Her descriptions of the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden are especially interesting. So often we focus on the horrible things done to the Jews and gypsies in the Holocaust, as we well should. But we must also rmember that the German people were also victims of this terrible regime. Some helped the regime and others fought it. I very much enjoyed this book and recommend it. I read it in a day. Not difficult, but hard to put down.

Hiltgunt's parent taught her to think for herself and were liberals. Her father lost his job as a teacher for among other things praising Albert Schweizer and his "reverence for life" ideology. Apparently the Nazis didn't buy into that. One morning they awoke to find their house plastered with yellow paper covered with Swastikas.

Her first act of resistance was to refuse to give the Nazi salute every morning in school.

She graduated from Hamburg University with a degree in Scandinavian languages. This was a very rare degree and she was drafted to be a postal censor reading the mail between the Ghettos and Scandinavia. Rather than destroy letters with forbidden content, she found another way to send them on to Scandinavia. In particular whe was supposed to censor any requests for food. In fact shed did the opposite and added requests for food to many letters.

Later, Norwegian and Danish prisoners convicted of resisting the Third Reich were imprisoned in Hamburg. Hiltgunt was assigned to monitor the prison visits of a minister to the prisoners. structions were to prevent spiritual guidance and prayer (a rule she broke on the very first visit.) She ended up smuggling food and vitamins to the prisoners on every visit.

How could a young woman risk her life constantly in order to perform these acts of kindness in the midst of the insanity of WW2 and the destruction of her home town? Ultimately, she was responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of Norwegian and Danish prisoners.