While I normally enjoy reading WWII memoirs, I just couldn't get into this one. I found some of the invented details about her ancestors to be unnecessary, and the back-and-forth perspective didn't work for me.

After the author loses her mother, she is determined to find out more about their family's history in Vienna during WWII. I love memoirs about this time period and this is a worthy new addition to the genre. I especially enjoyed reading about Vienna - the food, the people, the history - and also the complex relationship between mother & daughter. Excellent memoir!

For most of us, our mother are just our mothers. If they had a life before we, their children came along, it was almost surely, just…ordinary. That’s what Julie Metz thought about her mother, Eve. It wasn’t until after her mother’s death that Metz found a keepsake box filled with letters of goodbye to a little girl named Eva, in reality, her mother Eve. As Metz searched for clues to her mother’s past, she learns that her mother was a child in Nazi occupied Austria and the story of her escape from Hitler’s Final Solution. Grappling with her mother’s silence about her past, Metz must come to terms with the horrors her family survived and the sacrifices they made to save one another. This is a profound an beautiful book, one that will leave every reader deeply moved