A self-published book written by the grandmother of my friend Charles (Bill) Brimacombe, with support from his aunt (I think), this is a very matter-of-fact account of life in Germany during the rise of the Nazis and then their rule. Biddy was an upper-middle class woman who had led a sheltered life, but was "spirited" and ran away from her family to Germany, where she married a working-class German man. They both became Communists, and she writes about their activities - in the tail end of Weimar and then under Nazi rule - in a somewhat dispassionate way, though the book is all the more revealing for that.
Biddy's British passport was cancelled so that she could stay in Germany, but she held on to the document, which enabled her and daughters to leave the Soviet occupation zone and return to Britain at the end of the war. Her account of her mental breakdown, and time inside various psychiatric facilities, when she's back in Britain is the hardest part of the book to read.
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