"Where's Sylvia?": The Story of an American Child Lost in Nazi Germany - Paperback

by Linda Lamura McFadden (Author)

Never give up for that is just the place and time the tide will turn." -Harriet Beecher Stowe Where's Sylvia? is a true story. Only six, "Little Sylvia" leaves her parents and their bakery in the Bronx, NY to go to Germany with her Aunt Betty and Uncle Walter. They are supposed to bring her back before school starts in the fall. They don't. They can't. It's Autumn, of 1939. Hitler's Blitzkrieg is in motion. Europe is at war. Sylvia is going to have wait a "lifetime." A U.S. citizen, she will become an "Enemy Alien" when America enters World War II. Through "the duration," she lives with nuns, spends two years in German schools in the Rhineland and then runs east with Betty and her two children to escape Allied bombings. Before her thirteenth birthday, she learns how to survive a brutal dictatorship, her aunt's growing hysteria, her uncle being "drafted" into the Germany Army, her father's abandonment of her mother and his attraction to the Nazi regime. Ultimately, she manages to fearlessly dodge soldiers, bullets, bombs and tanks, and wait to be rescued. Her mother's life in America adds to the compelling nature of the story-is her only child alive or dead? Will she be found? Everyone is waiting and wants to know: Where's Sylvia?