The Enchanted Suitcase: A Window Onto My German Father's World War II Life

Unexpectedly finding her German father's World War II memoirs in an old suitcase, transports author Helga Warren to romantic Paris in wartime, surrender from inside a German bunker on the beaches of Normandy, behind the barbed wire of a prisoner of war camp in Aliceville, Alabama and on to the start of a new life in America.

The author discovers a man full of enthusiasm and the fervor of youth—and a marvelous writer—revealing unseen sides of the father she thought she knew. A whole new world opens up, all because of a sheaf of tattered papers in the bottom of what can only be called an enchanted suitcase.

One of the few eyewitness accounts of the little-known history of German prisoners of war in America during World War II, Karlheinz Stoess's story gives us a glimpse into the life of what was known as a "Scheuerfrau" or "scrubwoman" of the Wehrmacht—an ordinary German soldier at the crossroads of history.

Helga Warren is a Washington, DC tour guide specializing in German and French tours of the city, and a formerpublic school German Immersion teacher. She lives in the Virginia suburbs of the nation's capital with herhusband.The daughter of two German parents, she grew up in a German-speaking household and had the goodfortune of spending her teenage years in Paris, which led to lifelong involvement with languages.Her grandchildren are the light of her life.She would never have written a book if it weren't for that old suitcase.