Description
Book SynopsisEscape into Danger tells the remarkable story of a young girl's perilous adventures and coming of age during World War II. Born in Kiev to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, Sophia Williams chose to be identified as Jewish when she was eligible for a Soviet passport, mandatory at the age of sixteen, little realizing the life-changing consequences of her decision. Only seventeen when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Sophia left Kiev, unwittingly escaping the Babi Yar massacre. On her journey into Russia, she fled from flooding, dodged fires and bombs, and fell in love. At Stalingrad, Sophia turned back in a futile attempt to return home to her mother. Stranded in a Nazi-occupied town, accepted as a Russian, she found work with a sympathetic German officer and felt secure until a local girl recognized her as a Jew. Within days, Sophia's boss spirited her to safety with his family in Poland. Soon, though, Sophia was on the run again, this time to Nazi Germany, where, befriended by Germ
Trade ReviewWilliams’ staggering autobiography of her WWII survival as a Russian Jew begins after Stalin’s 1930 collectivization, when famine and deadly epidemics overtook Kiev, and people stood in long ration lines for sawdust-fortified bread. As a child, she fled with her mother to rural Ukraine with its plentiful food and resilient peasants, and there she worked in the ambulance corps service during the 1932 scarlet fever outbreak. Kiev’s food supplies eventually improved, but disgust with Stalin’s KGB provoked Sophia to defiantly identify herself as a Jew on her Soviet passport. Transferred at 17 from her government work in the city to relative safety inland, Williams remembers, 'No one dreamed how fast the Germans could reach the Dnieper or how bewildered we would be when they did.' She found wartime romance, retreated to Stalingrad, then tried to return to her mother in Kiev despite 'the wounds of war' and Nazi occupation. Her luck and pluck attested by this arresting account of wartime survival and postwar life command attention, reinforcing the fact that war in all its forms is hell. * Booklist *
Williams' story is an intimate look at her survival in Russia and Germany during WWII. The daughter of a Roman Catholic and a Jew, at age 16—just a year before Germany would invade Russia in 1941—Williams unwittingly chose to list her nationality as 'Jewish' on her passport, 'an easy choice to make,' but one that would change her life. Williams spent the entirety of the war narrowly escaping the grasp of the Nazis, eventually immigrating to the U.S. in 1952. * Publishers Weekly *
Escape into Danger provides unusual, intimate views of prewar Soviet life and German society during the war. Sophia’s descriptions, expectations, and interactions are detailed, colorful, and engaging. Her recklessness and lack of perspective are revealing, keeping the story true to her understanding of the time and the real danger that she faced. -- Wendy Lower, Claremont McKenna College
Sophia’s retelling is so vivid, and the book so successfully transports the reader back into the world of Sophia's youth, that your imagination doesn't trust what the cold logic of your intellect is telling you. . . . [This] is one of the all-time great stories, one of those true stories that no fictional writer could ever sell convincingly because some life goes beyond what art can imitate. . . . Williams takes you back to her world as a teenaged Ukrainian Jewish girl caught in Ukraine's national nightmare of Nazi occupation—yet [this world] is not a nightmare world. Looking back sixty years later, with the wisdom of eighty years in her pocket, Williams manages to recreate for the reader the . . . always charming teenager who was too busy falling in and out of love and friendship—too busy living—to be always dwelling on the Damoclean sword looming over her days. . . . This is no mean feat for a first-time author writing in her fifth language. -- Ken Pierce, blogger
Table of ContentsPart I: Spring of Youth 1 Full of Spunk 2 “Let It Rot!” 3 Politics 4 Internationalka 5 An Omen Fulfilled Part II: The Steppes Aflame 6 Partings 7 Flagship Stalin 8 Narrow Escapes 9 Flight to the East 10 The Turning Point 11 My Purse! 12 Stranded 13 Waiting for the Enemy Part III: German Occupation 14 Facing the Invaders 15 To Register—or Not? 16 A Promotion 17 “You Haven’t Lost Everything.” 18 German Studies 19 A Lamb in Spring 20 Rescued Part IV: Eye of the Hurricane 21 On a Nazi Train 22 “Good Little Farmer” 23 A Red Silk Camisole 24 Lord of the Manor 25 Red Cross Nurse 26 The Truth Comes Out Part V: Inside Nazi Germany 27 Nemesis on Horseback 28 Found! 29 A Proposal 30 Beethoven’s Fifth 31 Hope 32 Half-Crazy, or in Love 33 Crisscrossing the Third Reich 34 “Imagine, Running into You!” 35 Off to the Alps Part VI: Postwar Germany 36 Liberated by the Americans 37 A Changed Man 38 Ten Centimes Short 39 Pedaling through the Slush 40 A Twenty-Mark Fine 41 In the Cards 42 Bird in a Maze 43 A Double Rainbow
