Give Me Tomorrow

This memoir chronicles the early life and tragedies of a young German girl during WWII in Pomerania, as the Soviet Union expelled thousands of eastern Europeans from their homelands and reshaped countries’ borders as part of an Allied agreement near the end of the war. The story begins with descriptions of a pastoral life in a German farming village in the early 1930s and transitions to how the war affected these rural villages in eastern Germany. When the Russian army invaded the village, Ingrid’s father hid his daughters in the barn hayloft while their brother sneaked food through the barn boards. Their father was taken by the Russians to Siberia and the family was broken apart. Ingrid, only 16 at the time, was held in several Russian internment camps. The rest of the family and villagers were marched, with what they could carry, to resettlement locations, never to return to their homes and land again. Later, Poles were forced from their homelands to resettle in this Pomeranian region. Ingrid’s ordeals in the camps are detailed. Nine months later, after the war had ended, Ingrid was released and found herself in West Germany. The memoir continues as she searches for her family, finds them in the communist East German state, and must decide whether to remain there or look for opportunity in the West.