Irene is a survivor. This is her true-life story. Born in the same year as Anne Frank, she lived through the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, except Irene survived World War 2. She helped Jews hide during the holocaust and sneaked aboard trains returning from the Eastern Front. As a kid, she watched bombs fall and scrounged to provide for her family. When the Iron Curtain went up, the Russians occupied her homeland and Cold War Europe was more harsh than any trial before. Irene disguised herself as a boy, hiding in plain sight for three years. She traded at black markets and traveled dangerous ways to provide food and necessities. Nurse training gave Irene a career and a precarious young adult romance began behind the Iron Curtain, where her longing for freedom caused suspicion among the communist comrades at work. She was forced to flee alone from East Berlin to West Berlin in 1953. For years, she suffered from PTSD until she began recovery writing and finished these memoirs. All three of her historic survivor books are in this volume (My World War 2 Childhood, Years Hidden As a Boy, and Journey to Freedom), as well as World War 2 European maps, a WWII and Holocaust timeline, and historic images not included in previous releases of the book series.
