In 1978, Gerda Behrendt sat down with a tape recorder and began to record her life story. Born in Berlin in 1912 to Jewish parents, Gerda was 21 when she first watched Hitler and his SA brown-shirts march through the capital, carrying torches and chanting anti-Semitic slogans. Even in 1933, she could tell nothing good would come from it.

Gerda married her husband, Martin, a Jewish chemist and amateur painter, in 1936, and gave birth to a son in November of 1938, but she was soon forced to take her family into hiding as Hitler’s vision of violence clenched down on Germany’s Jews. Surviving only by the grace of a few friends, Gerda and Martin managed to raise their son in hiding, secrecy, and alternate identity within Nazi Germany, losing everything they had to preserve those closest to them. 

Against all odds, Gerda and her family emerged from the Nazi regime only to endure a brutal Russian invasion and the subsequent terrors of Soviet East Germany. Their lives still in peril, her husband in a Communist prison under false charges of treason, Gerda was again forced to escape with her son in 1953, first to a refugee camp in West Berlin, and eventually to Los Angeles, where they could start a new life in America. 

I found my grandmother’s tapes as a writing student in 2003. Gerda was still alive at 91, living in a nursing home 5 minutes from my parents’ house, and 15 minutes from my own. My father was a teenager when they came to the United States, and she had lived near him for much of the rest of her life. As I began to transcribe her recordings — the incredible story of her survival, her haunting testimonial to life in Nazi Germany, the narrow circumstances of my father’s existence — I could not help but be inspired to record my own account of the ongoing heroics of these strong and independent people, battling age, illness, memory loss and inevitable death in contemporary America. 

The culmination of more than 20 years of research and backed by hundreds of surviving documents and photos, this emotional real-life story interweaves multiple narratives with excerpts from letters, diaries, and the collective memories of five generations of a family. It takes readers from a 19th-century Russian Empire to a 21st-century U.S. From a young German girl who wanted to be a dressmaker to a terrified mother protecting her family from destruction. From a Jewish boy miraculously raised in the Nazi capital to an enterprising young man in America. From a grandson’s daily visits with his grandmother to the passing of generations. From the loss of a father to becoming 

In the exciting and historic vein of Unbroken and In The Garden Of Beasts, Notes From The Fatherland is an indelible tale of hope and inheritance through centuries of Jewish life.tion goes here