The File On Fraulein Berg - Softcover

Lingard, Joan

3.86

43 ratings by Goodreads

9780340764640: The File On Fraulein Berg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340764643 ISBN 13: 9780340764640

Publisher: Hodder Children's Books, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

1944 Belfast. Fraulein Berg arrives to teach German at Kate, Harriet and Sally's school. Saturated with war-time propaganda, reading spy stories and imagining themselves dropping over enemy lines to perform daring and heroic deeds, the girls decide that, as she's German, she must be the enemy - and she must be a spy. They set to work to prove it, following her everywhere, recording everything in notebooks, hounding her, seeing themselves as valiant secret service agents helping their country. Finally on a train travelling between Dublin and Belfast, they alert a border guard ... The story is told by Kate years later, always haunted by their silly antics at the time, and often wondering what happened, in the end, to the unhappy Fraulein Berg. In fact, she was a Jewish escapee from Nazi Germany, having lost parents, two sisters and a brother in the gaschambers. Kate reflects that, so used to dividing people up into Protestants and Catholics, enemies and friends, they had never stopped to think of the tragedy they might be creating..

First published in 1980 by Julia MacRae Books

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

The welcome re-issue of a novel set in Belfast during the Second World War. Although set in the past, the subject - the terrorising of someone simply on the basis of ignorant suspicion - is resoundingly contemporary. (The Scotsman, July 2000)

powerful and disturbing (Shelf Life, issue 15, Winter 2000)

Book Description:

A powerful story of prejudice in wartime Ireland

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.