09 Jan Berlin Wild
Berlin Wild, WWII Book by Elly Welt
(1986) A young half-Jewish boy in WWII Berlin goes to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurophysiological Research, Berlin-Hagan. By doing this and with the help of the scientists there he is able to evade both the Nazis and later, the Russians. That’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is that he cannot escape the nightmares of what happened to his friends and his family during those wartime years.
I kept thinking to myself … who wrote this amazing book? Her name is Elly Welt, and I found in this article that she is/was a creative writing professor at Northern Kentucky University. It took her ten years to write it. Her husband had been hidden from the Nazis in a Berlin scientific institute where “they were making vodka all day long.” Elly did an incredible amount of research in order to detail the genetics and radiation studies going on at the Institute. Another article explains that the genetics department she described was based on a real one.
“Berlin Wilds” were the fruit flies the scientists would trap the park just outside the building. The name also refers to the wild and dangerous state of affairs in Berlin at the end of the war.
Berlin Wild (Onyx) at amazon.com
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