Negative Positive
Title: A child grows up in Berlin
Review: This first-person account of a girl growing up in Berlin during the Third Reich provides the flesh on the bones of this part of German history. The author recounts the story through the innocent eyes of childhood, the remembered details especially poignant because a child's memories are of a world not judged, but accepted as it is. The author begins her story with her first days of school, singing hymns. Gradually school changes. The hymns become martial Nazi songs, the teachers become agents or resistors of the Nazis. Life includes complications such as avoiding Nazi service and ideas. She spends an obligatory year at farmwork. As the author grows older, the skies contain not clouds but bombers. She is almost crushed to death in the rush to enter an air-raid shelter. And at the end, as the Russians enter the Berlin suburbs, the war comes into her home in a new and personal way.
Is the review positive or negative? 