Grete Weil was one of the very few German writers who lost family and friends to the Nazis and returned to Germany after the war to rebuild their lives. In this collection of short fiction, the author looks beyond the loss of her loved ones and the effect of the era on her fellow Germans to its effects on those who had fled to apparent safety in California, New York, Paris, or even the forests of the Yucatan. Weil compares them to survivors of an atom-bomb blast, who live beyond the initial explosion and consider the worst to be over, only to later sicken and die. The fugitives' lives are damaged, even physically destroyed, by the aftershock ―by their inability to shed the culture of the country from which they have fled, their intense memories of happier times, and by the constant intrusion of the ghosts of both victims and persecutors.
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