Displaced Person: A Girl's Life in Russia, Germany, and America

by Ella E. Schneider Hilton, Angela K. Hilton

Though told with charm and humor, Ella's life reads like a suspense novel. On the day that Germany invades Russia, her father is arrested in Kiev by Soviet authorities, never to be heard from again. Ella's family flees, returning only when the city falls to the Germans. Fluent in German, her mother provides for her children by assisting the occupying forces. When the city is about to return to Russian hands, the family must flee again, this time escaping to Germany by freight train.
Despite her hard life as a refugee - food is scarce and Allied bombings kill her grandmother and destroy yet another home - Ella finds solace in others and retains her indomitably inquisitive spirit. Her mother marries a widower to survive, and the family emigrates to the United States. As the indentured servants of their "sponsor family" in Mississippi, they pick cotton and live in poverty. Ella, puzzled by segregation, learns about the Holocaust (which her abusive stepfather denies) and realizes that her late father was probably Jewish. Throughout her ordeals, she never relinquishes hope or sight of her goal of education. Her memoir ends with the happy news that she has received a full scholarship to college.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

296 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2003

Reviews

[Pearson, · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ella Schneider tells a very compelling story about her life, first in Kiev, Russia, then Germany during the WWII years, and finally, in Mississippi with her family as indentured servants for a year. It is a book about discrimination in many respects as she and her family are considered Russian by the Germans even though they are of German heritage,and, as second class citizens in the States once they emigrated.

[Polly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing life

[Tracy Juengst · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think with what is going on with the refugee crisis today in Syria, people should read how people over the years have been treated as refugees and this book talks about condition of European camps and being a sharecropper in the deep south. This was a deep rich story of Ella's experience. If you ever get to meet her, let her tell you a story about her life. I met her at a timeshare discussion of the book. I think it is time this book was made into a movie for people to have insight on the problems of being a refugee. You don't have the freedom of movement in some countries, or a job... for years. This was a great book, read it!

[Karola · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a story very similar to the upheavel my own parents went through in the Baltics and Europe during WWII.

[Jennie Howatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

These type of memoirs always remind me that I have a very cushy life.