Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Memoirs

THE HANDS OF WAR

Marione Ingram

A Tale of Endurance and Hope From a Survivor of the Holocaust

Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor. This is her story.

As a young girl, Marione was aware that people of the Jewish faith were regarded as outsiders, the supposed root of Germany’s many problems. She grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo. Marione’s mother attempted suicide after receiving a deportation notice—Marione revived her, but then the bombs started to fall as the Allies leveled the city in eight straight days of bombings. Somehow Marione and her mother and sister survived the devastating firestorms. More than 40,000 perished, and almost the same numbered were wounded. Marione and her family miraculously escaped and sought shelter with a contact in the countryside who grudgingly agreed to house them in a shed for more than a year. With the war drawing to a close, they went west, back to Hamburg. There they encountered Allied troops, who reinstalled the local government (made up of ex-Nazis) in order to keep order in the country. Life took on the air of what it used to be. Jews were still second-class citizens. In the most bittersweet of ironies, Marione grew into a beautiful young revolutionary; she joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s and traveled to Mississippi where she helped to open a Freedom School — temporary free schools for African Americans in the South that were part of a nationwide effort to help achieve racial equality.But she was not finished fighting discrimination as she faced harassment and threats from the Ku Klux Klan, who eventually torched her Freedom School. A lifelong pacifist an outspoken activist against war and discrimination -- "killing contests," she calls them — Marione continues to use her horrible memories of Hamburg and her time in Mississippi as motivation to keep the fight going, to promote equality for people of all races and creeds.

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Book Published 2013-03-01 by Skyhorse

Comments

[Ingram’s] memoir is extremely well developed, well researched, and delivered with vivid, animated description. She induces a depth of passion into her childhood memories, an aspect lacking in many memoirs.

With lots of full-page photos of the Hamburg firebombing, this important historical account is bound to spark discussion. Pair it with accounts of the firebombing of Dresden.

Finely delineated details distinguish this memoir by Hamburg native Ingram, now an artist living in Washington, D.C. Ingram inserts some staggering details . . . A well-honed tale of momentous courage and strength. Read more...

Ms. Ingram looks back into her past, generating a stirring memoir filled with destruction and death, then revealing hope revived by dreams for parity for all of America’s inhabitants. Read more...

A Washingtonian Reflects On Childhood Consumed By Conflict. Read more...

What sets Marione Ingram's Holocaust memoir apart is that she witnessed and survived the bombings of Hamburg. Read more...

Marione Ingram’s account of how she escaped the razing of Hamburg with her mother . . . brings searing phosphorescent color to a scenario so often imagined in grainy black and white, as she and her mother pick their way through burning streets and past bleeding victims.

Die Alpträume verfolgen sie bis heute: Als Hamburg vor 70 Jahren von Bombern angegriffen wurde, irrte Marione Ingram tagelang mit ihrer Mutter durch die Hölle. Read more...

Terrifyingly vivid, Marione Ingram’s account of the 1943 bombing of Hamburg recalls John Hersey’s celebrated report from Hiroshima. Only here, the author and her mother walked through the rain of bombs and somehow lived. . . . Perhaps if those who fund and profit from wars cared to read memories such as these, the expectations of this new century would be just a little brighter.