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

Though told with charm and humor, Ella's life reads like a suspense novel. On the day that Germany invades Russia, her father is arrested in Kiev by Soviet authorities, never to be heard from again. Ella's family flees, returning only when the city falls to the Germans. Fluent in German, her mother provides for her children by assisting the occupying forces. When the city is about to return to Russian hands, the family must flee again, this time escaping to Germany by freight train.
Despite her hard life as a refugee - food is scarce and Allied bombings kill her grandmother and destroy yet another home - Ella finds solace in others and retains her indomitably inquisitive spirit. Her mother marries a widower to survive, and the family emigrates to the United States. As the indentured servants of their "sponsor family" in Mississippi, they pick cotton and live in poverty. Ella, puzzled by segregation, learns about the Holocaust (which her abusive stepfather denies) and realizes that her late father was probably Jewish. Throughout her ordeals, she never relinquishes hope or sight of her goal of education. Her memoir ends with the happy news that she has received a full scholarship to college.