The beginning part of this book was very good, describing the author and her parents' pre-war experiences before and during World War II. Margrit Rosenberg Stenge was born in Germany to a comfortable middle-class family. With the rise of the Nazi regime she and her parents fled to Norway and settled in Oslo. Once the Germans invaded Norway, the Rosenbergs, knowing what they could expect as Jews, fled again to a remote mountain village, where they were supported by the community, who knew they were Jews. However, they still felt unsafe, and after a few years in the village, with the help of a young member of the Norwegian Resistance, they crossed the border into neutral Sweden and waited out the war there.

All this was told very well, and there aren't many books (in English at least) about the Holocaust in Norway, so it was a bit of a novelty to read Stenge's account. However, the book wasn't even halfway through when the war ended, and Stenge spent the rest of the pages talking about things that were pretty much of no interest to me: her marriage, all her children, crisscrossing the world moving from one country to the next, her husband's career, her grandchildren, etc etc etc. I really didn't care and contemplated just not finishing the book, but I soldiered through.

I think it would have been much better if the book had ended, say, with Stenge's marriage to a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, or perhaps at the death of her father in 1948. Either of those would have been suitable endcaps for the story and cut out all the irrelevant details. This was, after all, marketed as a Holocaust memoir, not a full biography of Stenge's life, which, following the war, was deeply ordinary. ( )