My Three Countries: A Journey from Privilege to Slavery to Freedom

by Anna Melgaard, Alice Ard, Ellen Fredericks

Born in Romania, Anna Untch grew up in a community that gave special privileges to Saxons. She spent her childhood working on the family farm and learned German in school. But after World War II, the reparations Germany owed the Soviets were paid in the form of hard labor. Anna, her sisters, and thousands of Germanic people were rounded up at gunpoint and marched to the nearest train station, where boxcars waited to take them to the Soviet bloc. What followed were years of slave labor, starvation, illness and little hope—until a daring escape changed everything.

Sick and emaciated, Anna was sent to East Germany to recuperate. There she found her sister, and together they escaped across the border into the American Zone in West Germany. Barred from returning to their home, they relied on an uncle in the United States to send for them—a bureaucratic process that took two years. But once in America, the young woman from Romania found her footing. All that remained was to tell her a story of privilege, slavery and freedom. A story of a woman who achieved the American Dream.

215 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 2, 2018

Reviews

[Jean Sautter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hidden history of post-WW II slavery

I grew up knowing Anna Melgaard and knew a little of her story. It is important that these personal histories are passed down because much of the history taught in schools has been edited. No one in America learns about the horrors Anna and her community suffered.

[Megan Passey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quick but impactful read. This is a memoir of a woman who grew up in Romania, was sent to work in a labor camp in Ukraine after WWII as part of Germany's war reparations, and eventually ended up in prosser WA. A constant in her life was farming. She farmed her family's land in Romania, then at the labor camps, and finally on her own land in WA.

I had never heard that able bodied German young men and women were sent to work in Russian labor camps. They sent everyone 18-30, even if you were married or had children.