This is one of the most interesting books I've ever read, I think. From the poignant subtitle "The Story of a German Family" to the last lines of the book:

One of my first memories of the new era: I got slapped hard in the face. I can't remember who did it, whether it was Else or Barbara, I just remember flying through the kitchen. I had to become an adult before I understood why. Half-pint as I was, I had asked out of the blue, "Where did all the love for the Führer go? Why does nobody say Heil Hitler anymore?" Perhaps I should have asked, "Why did anybody ever say it?"

I didn't want to put it down and I was annoyed when I was interrupted. Beyond that, I realized that the vast majority (heck; basically all) of books I've read on this topic are from a Jewish point of view or about Jews, except for that Doris Kearns Goodwin book on Eleanor Roosevelt, which I read in tandem with The Twilight of Courage. So this was a first for me, and it was a big one.

I think I have too many things in this book marked. Now to choose which ones to write about and what to say ...

There are quotes in this book that seriously made me pause. And think. "Only we, the next generation, were to deal with the catastrophe that our country had wrought on others. My sister told me how Else learned of the extermination camps after the war. White in the face, she stood in the doorway and said, "We Germans will never be forgive that. We Germans. Auschwitz -- a mortgage. Not a word, not a single word in all those years about the victims."

And "Sixty years on I can't sit here ruthlessly 'being right.' My luck was the caesura -- I began when everything had stopped."

And then the reason for this book "I want to understand what it was that did such damage to my generation, to those born later. For this I must return to the history of those who have written my history, to my family's forefathers. I must go to Halberstadt."

Sometimes when I hear something about Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I am not sure if it's real or made up. And then I read something that so simply explains it that I know it's real. For the author, it affected her entire cache of memories:

I have my own story about Easter eggs. It happened in 1945, the first time I had blown eggs for the Easter wreath and glued silhouetted figures all over it. The wreath stood on the dining table, and my dangling eggs were the loveliest, of course. When the inferno struck over Halberstadt on April 8, the Sunday after Easter, when that large-scale raid reduced 80 percent of the old town to rubble, the house stood firm, no one died. But the chandelier over the dining table crashed down on the Easter wreath and broke my eggs. The conflagration scorched my memory. Everything that existed before was buried in rubble and horror. Sic years were blown away, I know nothing about myself. My life began with my fury at the destruction of my Easter eggs.

And again, around her sister's wedding: "I try to imagine what my sister, then still so young, must have felt inside. Years later I asked her. She couldn't remember -- "I wasn't there!" The horror of what came later had consigned that time to oblivion.

In speaking of "destruction through labor" and the camps in Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Bergen-Belsen, the author asks for us, Why am I telling this? Because the story can never be told too often ... which incidentally, is why, I suppose, I keep reading books on this topic.

I found sections like this haunting: Whom does HG talk to instead? Nobody, I think. All these men, unless they are sitting in the eye of the hurricane, are condemned to silence. They do their duty, their task is the solution of upcoming problems, not a preoccupation with their own fears. There is a reason almost all of HG's letters from 1944 end with the words "Your lonely husband."

And then there is the discussion of "Sippenhaftung", or "punishment of kin", which makes me think that only people who thought to rid the world of a certain race, or somehow-crippled members of their own race would think to further punish "officially" members of the family of the people who carried out the plot.

And the part that made me cry -- some of the author's comments to her father:

Have I misunderstood you, because you never said anything? now you are dying as an "Untermensch." They deprived you of the cleric you requested. But your Mount of Olives is behind you, and you are a hero in your death. You lived in awful times, and if you wanted things to be better for your children, then you succeeded. You have paid the "blood toll" so that I don't have to. I have learned from you what I must guard against. That's what a father's there for, isn't it? I thank you.

I'm to the end of my review and have no way to close. I'm a girl who doesn't even like non-fiction, and yet, this book captivated me from start to finish. It will stay with me for a while.