"Hearing German voices speak of events occurring between the 1930s and '40s provides gripping testimony of the challenges Germans faced during these eventful years. While much history has been written about this time period, Jean Messinger's interviews allow us to see through the eyes of participants the horrors of war, the roots of totalitarianism from the bottom up, the tenacity of the human spirit, and many of the common threads that bind and unite us as human beings. These stories touch and reveal to us aspects of the human condition that narrative histories of the time cannot." -- G. Dale Greenawald, Doctor of Arts, Modern European History, Carnegie Mellon University.