Tales from a Child of the Enemy

Plot

Ursula Duba was born in Cologne, Germany, at the outbreak of World War II. She grew up in postwar Germany and, at age nineteen, during a trip abroad, on a blind date with a Jewish boy, found out about the atrocities her people committed during the Thousand Year Reich. What she learned changed her relationship with her family and with her country forever. In these deceptively simple, evocative, and unforgettable narrative poems, Duba tells of a child subjected to nonstop bombing, hunger, and family turmoil; of a girl who grows up hearing the constant lament of the suffering inflicted on Germany; and of a young woman who, thirteen years after the end of the war, learns of the Holocaust, of her country's complicity in it and denial of responsibility for it. Other poems tell of her family and countrymen who consider her interest in the truth a betrayal. Interwoven with these are the wrenching stories of the Holocaust survivors and their children who were her neighbors in an Eastern European neighborhood in Brooklyn in the mid-sixties. Duba's confrontation with her heritage is unflinching and the stories hard to forget.