Book description
ONE LIFE. TWO HEROIC ACTS, HALF A CENTURY APART. Otto Eisinger, an
elderly German émigré living alone in Brazil, attempts to thwart a
pair of armed robbers and is savagely beaten. While he is convalescing
in hospital, the media get hold of the CCTV footage and the old man
unknowingly becomes a national hero. Otto is visited in the ward by
his housekeeper's grandson, Pietro, a young journalist eager to
understand the source of his extraordinary bravery. In a
morphine-induced haze, and prompted by the uncanny resemblance between
Pietro and Siggi, his closest friend in the Hitler Youth, Otto begins
to relive memories that he has spent a lifetime suppressing -- and
whose meaning he has still not fully understood. To Greet the Sun
offers a compelling, psychologically nuanced portrait of a man born in
Germany in 1929 -- a man whose childhood was spent in the suffocating
embrace of the Nazi regime, and who, aged fifteen, was willing to risk
his life to defend the Führer. It is a story of kindness and courage
as well as of guilt, and of an unlikely friendship that bridges
continents and generations.
