Annette Oppenlander

Surviving the Fatherland - Surviving the Fatherland .

***Winner 2017 'National Indie Excellence Award'*** ***Finalist 2017 Kindle Book Awards*** ***An IWIC 'Hall of Fame' Novel*** "This book needs to join the ranks of the classic survivor stories of WWII such as "Diary of Anne Frank" and "Man's Search for Meaning". It is truly that amazing!" InD'taleMagazine "This novel is fast-paced and emotively worded and features a great selection of characters, flawed and poignantly three-dimensional." Historical Novel Society Spanning thirteen years from 1940 to 1953 and set against the epic panorama of WWII, author Annette Oppenlander's SURVIVING THE FATHERLAND is a sweeping saga of family, love, and betrayal that illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the children's war. SURVIVING THE FATHERLAND tells the true and heart-wrenching stories of Lilly and Günter struggling with the terror-filled reality of life in the Third Reich, each embarking on their own dangerous path toward survival, freedom, and ultimately each other. Based on the author's own family and anchored in historical facts, this story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the strength of war children. When her father goes off to war, seven-year-old Lilly is left with an unkind mother who favors her brother and chooses to ignore the lecherous pedophile next door. A few blocks away, twelve-year-old Günter also looses his father to the draft and quickly takes charge of supplementing his family's ever-dwindling rations by any means necessary. As the war escalates and bombs begin to rain, Lilly and Günter's lives spiral out of control. Every day is a fight for survival.

ISBN: 978-0-9977800-4-8