Book description
After her father, a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe, was killed
during a mission over the south coast of England, Gabrielle Robinson
was mainly brought up by her grandparents. Her grandfather, known to
her as Api, was an opthalmologist: a kind, gentle man who helped her
with her schoolwork and told her bedtime stories. Forty years after
his death, she discovered a diary that he had kept during the darkest
of dark days, beginning in April 1945, when he had left her and her
grandmother in the countryside and returned to Berlin. Api had been an
army doctor, stationed in the centre of the city, and as such, however
reluctantly, he had had to join the Nazi Party. His diary is a
heart-rending account of what it was like to live in Berlin as
Hitler's Reich collapsed - the hunger, the disease, the bombing, the
threat of retribution from the occupiers - and his struggle to
survive, to shake off the stigma of being a Party member, to rebuild
his life and to return to his beloved wife and granddaughter.
Gabrielle Robinson was born in Berlin in 1942, the daughter of a
Luftwaffe fighter pilot who died in 1943. Her grandparents brought her
up until her grandfather's death in 1955. She went on to obtain a PhD
from the University of London and was an English professor in American
universities until her retirement.
