Why a Booktrail?
1960s: A true story narrated through the eyes of a child.
You Would Have Missed Me
What you need to know before your trail
A family is torn apart by their dream of a better future in the West.West Germany, early 1960s: A little girl arrives with her parents from East Germany in a camp for displaced people. The girl’s father is abusive, the mother ignores her. Soon she will celebrate her seventh birthday and all she wants is a cat. Instead she receives an illuminated globe. The girl can’t hide her disappointment – but then she discovers that the globe offers her a way to escape the misery of the camp.
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Go back in time to 1960s West Germany – and the horrors of a displacement camp.
Why Peirene chose to publish this book:
Today, as in the past, people flee from one country to another in the hope of finding a better future. But how do children experience such displacement? How do they cope with traumas of a refugee camp? In this novel Birgit Vanderbeke goes back to her own childhood in the divided Germany of the 1960s. She shows how the little girl she once was saved herself by imagining countries on the far side of the world. A masterpiece of memory turned into fiction.
The story is narrated by a little girl now an older woman, looking back at her young self and reliving what she went through and how her child brain would have dealt with things compared to now. This story is very close to the author’s heart since she too fled with her family aged 5 and ended up in a displacement camp too.
In the book, the setting is the refugee camp, and then in a small flat in the city as they try to build their lives.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: You Would Have Missed Me
Destination: West Germany Author/Guide: Birgit Vanderbeke Departure Time: 1960s
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