Displaced Person: A Girl's Life in Russia, Germany, and America

by Ella E. Schneider Hilton, Karl A. Roider (Foreword by), Angela K. Hilton (Other)

Overview

In her moving and deeply personal memoir, Ella E. Schneider Hilton chronicles her remarkable childhood -- one that took her from the purges of Stalinist Russia to the refugee camps of Nazi and postwar Germany to the cotton fields of Jim Crow Mississippi before granting her access to the American dream. Despite her hard life as a refugee, Ella finds solace in others and retains her indomitably inquisitive spirit. Throughout her ordeals, she never relinquishes hope or sight of her goal of education.

Poignantly and freshly rendered, this is a tale of determination. It is the story of a girl caught up first in the maelstrom of World War II and then in the complexities of American southern culture, adjusting to events beyond her control with resiliency as she searches for faith, knowledge, and a place in the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807152690
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Ella E. Schneider Hilton lives in Virginia. Now retired, she was a teacher and worked for the U.S. Department of the Army for eighteen years.

Editorial Reviews

Hilton, born in Kiev in 1936 to a family of Volga Germans (emigrants from Germany to Russia at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763), lost her father shortly before the Nazi invasion in 1941. Was he deported to Siberia? Was he Jewish? Young Ella learned not to ask questions. Her mother worked as a translator for the occupying German army until the battle of Kiev, when she and her family joined the other Volga Germans heading for refugee camps in Germany. They spent the remainder of WWII in barracks and bomb shelters. "Displaced persons" after the war, the family feared repatriation to the Soviet Union, but with Lutheran Church sponsorship, they ended up in indentured service in rural Mississippi, from which they emerged, finally, in 1952, as "Real Americans." While this history fascinates, Ella's child's-eye perspective makes her story richer and more gripping. Watching her mother "lose" their identity papers while they were in the Nazi deportation camps during WWII and reinvent the family as Polish born, Ella learned that everyone lied-about where they came from, whether they were married, etc.-and that no one outside the family was told more than they needed to know. Ella learned that "Real Germans" would always treat refugees as inferiors, even after losing the war. Arriving stateside in 1952, she learned her beloved Tyrone Powers movies had lied about how America really looked. And sitting in a segregated Southern schoolroom, she learned, finally, that those real Germans killed millions of Jews. Fans of memoir will fall in love with Ella's story; it brims with wonderful detail on every phase of her life. Photos. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly