Flags in Berlin by Biddy Youngday (2012-04-15) Paperback – 1 Jan. 1810

An extraordinary memoir of an English lady living in Nazi Germany, in Berlin, in 2WW. The memoir raises so many questions? Why did she give up her British passport? How numbing and traumatic the execution of her husband, and the insider account of living in an English asylum in England after the war. How would Willie have fared, had he and Biddy returned to England in 1939; presumably he would have been interned. A very personal and insightful account of life at the time and having to survive.

I have personal interest in this period of German history as my English mother was married to a German and I was born in Hamburg in 1936. Luckily my parents got thrown out of Germany before the war. This account of living before and during the war is told in the first person and is beautifully written with an engaging style. The story itself contains so many remarkable events that it kept me wanting to read on and I picked it up in any free moment just to catch a few more paragraphs. The author was clearly a woman of great resource, she made her way through peaks and troughs of emotion that most of us could not handle. The fact that she had a serious nervous breakdown once she had safely got her children back to England reveals the tensions she must have had bottled up over those traumatic years. A book not to be missed.

Biddy Youngday's account of her war years in Nazi Berlin is a fascinating insight into how life for ordinary people changed under that regime. Biddy was an English woman married to a German, both communists and both resistant to the oncoming offences of the Nazi government. Her description of the ever-increasing threat to their liberty, the sense of suspicion and accusation (even from friends and neighbours), and finally facing the need to flee with her children is told with both a sense of foreboding, but also with a spirit of combined optimism and stoicism. Managing, alone, the various trials that her life and her time force upon her threatens to become overwhelming. Her tone throughout is authentic, conversational and candid, occasionally humorous and often sharply insightful. It is for the reader to be shocked, saddened or moved; Biddy does not seek to play on our emotions but simply tells it as it was. This makes it a very valuable book indeed.

Unique account of the experience of ordinary Germans during the war, from the viewpoint of an English woman who married a young German dissident, part of the small brave group of German Resistance.