Description

In this illuminating and deeply shifting memoir, a former American army intelligence officer is going past conventional Chilly Struggle espionage stories to inform the real tale of her circle of relatives—of 5 girls separated by means of the Iron Curtain for greater than 40 years, and their surprising reunion after the autumn of the Berlin Wall.

Forty Autumns makes visceral the ache and longing of 1 circle of relatives compelled to are living aside in a global divided by means of . At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. However the cost of freedom—leaving in the back of her oldsters, 8 siblings, and circle of relatives house—was once heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna sooner or later moved to The united states, the place she settled down together with her husband and had youngsters of her personal.

Growing up close to Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner turned into the primary feminine Military Intelligence Officer to steer delicate intelligence operations in East Berlin on the top of the Chilly Struggle. Although only some miles separated American Nina and her German household—grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic coaching crew—a sour political Struggle stored them aside.

In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her circle of relatives’s tale—5 atypical lives buffeted by means of cases past their regulate. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying global of East Germany underneath Communist rule, revealing each the harsh fact her household persevered and her personal stories as an intelligence officer, working mystery operations in the back of the Berlin Wall that placed her existence in peril.

A non-public take a look at a tenuous generation that divided a town and a country, and maintains to hang-out us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and fantastically written tale of braveness, resilience, and love—of 5 girls whose spirits may just now not be damaged, and who fought to maintain what issues so much: circle of relatives.

Forty Autumns is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white and colour pictures.