Forty Autumns

Nina Willner

Abacus, £9.99

Alastair Mabbott

AS A child in Kansas in the mid-60s, Nina Willner wondered why, unlike her classmates, she didn’t have grandparents. The explanation – that her mother’s family lived far away behind an “iron curtain” – didn’t immediately satisfy her, but it sparked in young Nina a curiosity about her East German mother’s side of the family. After recounting this episode, Willner flashes forward 20 years. Not, as one might expect, to a joyous family reunion, but to a nail-biting scene in which the adult Nina is being menaced by an East German soldier while on an undercover mission for US Army Intelligence – possibly only a few miles from her relatives but forbidden, for security reasons, to contact them.

Willner modestly plays down her own trailblazing exploits into the overwhelmingly male world of army intelligence, no doubt in deference to the courage of her mother, Hanna, and the resilience of the family Hanna left behind in the town of Schwaneberg when she escaped to the West in the late 1940s. After a couple of failed attempts, and a close brush with death, she made it over the border, got a job with the US Army, met her future husband (a Holocaust survivor who had become a GI), and moved to the States, where she raised Nina and five other children.

But as brave and inspiring as Hanna’s story is, the bulk of this memoir is drawn from the experiences of her extended family, who lived for 40 years under the privations of a totalitarian regime. With restrictions on travel and communications lifted, Willner has been able to piece together their story from surviving relatives, and this moving account is a testament to their fortitude.

Through long-lost cousins, Willner has finally learnt about the struggles of her grandmother, Oma, to keep the household running, setting up a “Family Wall” so they could speak their minds in safety, while coping with the knowledge that she would most likely never see her daughter Hanna again. She writes too of the great-grandfather who lived in fear of the collectivisation of the farm he had lived on all his life, and of the uncles and aunts who went through the indoctrination of Communist youth movements.

It’s her grandfather, Opa, whom one feels sorriest for. He was a big man, a schoolmaster respected throughout the town, who, when the Soviets took over, stoically taught the Communist curriculum with as much conviction and enthusiasm as he could. Opa found this harder to do as the years went by, to the point that this former pillar of the community was ritually humiliated for his lack of revolutionary fervour and expelled from Schwaneberg.

Willner writes about events that happened on another continent before she was born with such vividness and immediacy that she could almost have been there herself. This account of the collective sorrow of a family rent asunder, relating their experiences in the context of the Cold War, gives a human face to the millions for whom the Berlin Wall divided not just a city but their hearts.