Foreign Rights Catalogue - ANTHEA

Foreign Rights Guide August 2012 – January 2013
A Life without a Childhood
Monika Dahlhoff: A HANDFUL OF LIFE
My Childhood in the Gulag
True Story
272 pages
978-3-404-60714-3
Paperback
March 2013
There are not many people who have endured as much tragedy and horror in one lifetime as Monika
Dahlhoff. And there are even less people who do not crack under the strain of suffering and are able to
survive and tell their story.
Monika Dahlhoff, who was born in 1940, is still an infant when she loses her father, a soldier in the Air Force,
who is killed in action. In 1944 the family flees from Königsberg taking refuge with the grandparents in the
countryside. The mother does not stay but moves on to the West to find a place for the family where they are
safe from the Russian invasion. But the Russian soldiers are faster. Before the eyes of then 4-year-old
Monika, they shoot her beloved grandparents to death. Monika and her younger brother are deported to a
Russian labor camp. During the brutal transport, her little brother, who is physically disabled, dies in her arms.
Monika spends the next five years in this camp – under conditions that demean human dignity. There are a
few wooden shacks and some straw to sleep on, but bread or water gruel are only available at irregular
intervals; every once in a while, the children have to live on feces and rats. Many die from cold, starvation,
and disease. Monika is nine years old when the horror ends. Gravely ill and weak, she and the other surviving
children are transferred to the German Democratic Republic. At this point in time, Monika can neither read,
nor write, nor calculate. Her verbal knowledge and comprehension are limited to items and situations related
to life in the camp and lack the language competence needed for everyday life.
When a Hamburg-based tracing service tracks down her biological mother in the mid-1950s, it seems like a
silver lining on the horizon. However, her mother got remarried and has started a new family in Bavaria. It
looks as if Monika’s suffering will finally end. How can she anticipate that it will begin anew?
Over a period of three years, her stepfather sexually abuses his new stepdaughter, over and over and over
again. Her mother, whose love and protection Monika had craved for all these years, will never again get
close to her daughter. Lost and abandoned, without any formal education or job training, she packs her bag
in the dead of night, boards the first train that stops at the station, and in the middle of the night, she arrives in
Düsseldorf. She is eighteen years old and has nothing but a suitcase and 50 Deutschmarks in her pocket.
From this moment on, Monika’s life will never be the same, as she takes her fate into her own hands.
Monika Dahlhoff was born in 1940 in Kaliningrad. On her 18th birthday, she leaves her family and moves to
Düsseldorf, ready to start her own life. Today, Monika Dahlhoff has two grown daughters and lives with her
husband in Hamm.
Bastei Lübbe GmbH & Co. KG - Foreign Rights Department - Schanzenstraße 6-20 - 51063 Köln - Germany
Tel: +49 (0)2 21| 82 00 -27 04 or 27 00 - Fax: +49 (0)2 21| 82 00 17 04 Christian Stüwe (christian.stuewe@luebbe.de)
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