The woman from Hamburg and other true stories

"In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing will reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man learns Polish to communicate with his dybbuk, the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. A high-ranking German officer conceives of a plan to kill Hitler after witnessing a mass execution of Jews in Eastern Poland. And in the title story, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, a signmaker's daughter learns that her mother is not the woman who raised her but a mysterious stranger living in Germany."--BOOK JACKET.