She hid four Jews in an SS officer’s cellar. It was her husband’s house.
Berlin, 1912 to 1945. Greta Zolner is sold in marriage to a man who becomes a monster, and spends the war hiding the people he would kill — her oldest friend, her friend’s family, and the girl her son loves — under his own floor.
Three books. One family. One secret, kept for twenty-three years.
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The story
Greta has never been loved. Not by her father, who beats her; not by the wealthy Berlin family who buy her as a bride for their idle, violent son, Ludwig Lang. The only man she has ever loved is Hermann, the lame vegetable seller from her village, and one night with him gives her a son that Ludwig will raise as his own and never know is not his.
Then Hitler comes, and Ludwig finds his purpose. As he rises through the SS, Greta turns the cellar of his house into a hiding place: for Ruth, her oldest friend; for Ruth’s husband and his sister Rebecca; and for Lily, the woman whose life Ludwig destroyed twenty years earlier. When Ludwig hears laughter from under the floor, the family scatters — into the forest with the partisans, into Auschwitz, and into the hospital where the Reich decides which children get to live. Read in order, start to finish.
The trilogy
A Daughter’s Duty
Germany, 1912. Greta gets up before dawn, scrubs until her hands bleed, and watches her sister receive everything. When she falls in love with Hermann, her father beats her for it. Then a wealthy family from Berlin arrives needing a wife for their son — a simple girl who won’t ask questions — and Greta is sent away to a cold house, a faithless husband, and a woman watching from the shadows with nothing left to lose.
My Son’s Duty
Berlin, 1933. Ziggy is expected to become the perfect Nazi son, but beneath his obedience is a gentle heart and growing doubt. His father pushes him into a marriage meant to secure his future in the Party; behind closed doors, scandal and forbidden desire are already tearing the family apart. Meanwhile Greta risks everything to hide Jews in her cellar — and when Ziggy stumbles on the people beneath his own home, he must choose between the duty demanded of him and the conscience he can no longer ignore.
After the Betrayal
Berlin, October 1940. Tonight, Ludwig almost found them. They get out, and the family scatters: Rebecca goes into the forest with the partisans and learns to build bombs; Ziggy is sent to Auschwitz to be shown the work his father expects him to take up; and Ludwig looks at the newest child under his own roof and sees a problem to be solved. Greta lost a brother, years ago, to the men who decide which lives are worth keeping. She swore it would never happen again. But Ludwig moves first.
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