Under Fate's Wing: A Refugee Girl's Flight to Freedom in the Shadows of World War II

by Hillevi Ruumet

A six-year-old girl is abruptly ejected from her idyllic life in Estonia into the chaos of Hitler's collapsing Germany, where her heroic mother braves impossible odds to assure their survival. Failing to outrun the advancing Soviet troops on foot would mean a one-way trip to Stalin's Gulag.

Their desperate survival odyssey, marked by a series of uncanny serendipities, lands them in a postwar displaced persons' (DP) camp run by Americans. There, stateless and without a future, her family must find a country that will accept them as immigrants. After four years of fruitless search and dead ends, a miraculous turn of fate opens the door to a fresh start in New York, and a complete life transformation beyond anything they could have imagined.

This story won the top memoir prize at the 2014 San Francisco Writers' conference.

Genres: Nonfiction

308 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2015

Reviews

[Christi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated this well-written account of the experiences of Estonians who were forced to flee during WWII, told through the eyes of a child. The author’s experience is similar to that of my mother (also Estonian); reading the experiences of other Estonians during the was years helps me imagine a little better what it must have been like for her. This particular book reads very smoothly, and benefits from a well constructed narrative.

The second half of the book recounts the author’s life in 1950s New York and her junior year abroad in France. This was also a walk down memory lane for me, as my family also has NY connections and I myself did a junior year in France.

As a memoirist, the author does a good job of including some of her adult self’s reflections on these experiences, and how they shaped her world view.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this memoir which dealt with the author’s childhood memories of fleeing the Soviets at the end of WW 2 was far more engaging then the lengthy account of her American life and education.