Escape into Danger

February 13, 2012
Williams' story is an intimate look at her survival in Russia and Germany during WWII. The daughter of a Roman Catholic and a Jew, at age 16âjust a year before Germany would invade Russia in 1941âWilliams unwittingly chose to list her nationality as "Jewish" on her passport, "an easy choice to make," but one that would change her life. Williams spent the entirety of the war narrowly escaping the grasp of the Nazis, eventually immigrating to the U.S. in 1952. While laden with the expected drama of a WWII survival story, Williams' tale is primarily a lengthy list of men who helped rescue her again and again, from Aleksandr, whom she adored; to the sympathetic German officer whom she insists was a "father protector;" to Guido, an officer with the Luftwaffe. For all her looking back, it seems like Williams' most memorable incident involves getting caught trying on her benefactor's wife's lingerie. While likely fascinating to friends and family, clunky dialogue and not enough editing will limit the book's appeal to a general audience. Photos.

March 1, 2012
Williams' staggering autobiography of her WWII survival as a Russian Jew begins after Stalin's 1930 collectivization, when famine and deadly epidemics overtook Kiev, and people stood in long ration lines for sawdust-fortified bread. As a child, she fled with her mother to rural Ukraine with its plentiful food and resilient peasants, and there she worked in the ambulance corps service during the 1932 scarlet fever outbreak. Kiev's food supplies eventually improved, but disgust with Stalin's KGB provoked Sophia to defiantly identify herself as a Jew on her Soviet passport. Transferred at 17 from her government work in the city to relative safety inland, Williams remembers, No one dreamed how fast the Germans could reach the Dnieper or how bewildered we would be when they did. She found wartime romance, retreated to Stalingrad, then tried to return to her mother in Kiev despite the wounds of war and Nazi occupation. Her luck and pluck attested by this arresting account of wartime survival and postwar life command attention, reinforcing the fact that war in all its forms is hell.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)