The Enchanted Suitcase

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Unexpectedly finding her German father's World War II memoirs in an old suitcase, transports author Helga Warren to romantic Paris in wartime, surrender from inside a German bunker on the beaches of Normandy, behind the barbed wire of a prisoner of war camp in Aliceville, Alabama and on to the start of a new life in America. The author discovers a man full of enthusiasm and the fervor of youth-and a marvelous writer-revealing unseen sides of the father she thought she knew. A whole new world opens up, all because of a sheaf of tattered papers in the bottom of what can only be called an enchanted suitcase. One of the few eyewitness accounts of the little-known history of German prisoners of war in America during World War II, Karlheinz Stoess's story gives us a glimpse into the life of what was known as a "Scheuerfrau" or "scrubwoman" of the Wehrmacht-an ordinary German soldier at the crossroads of history.