Description
This is a story of the unexpected.In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir — an astonishing true tale of ways he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained at the back of together with his mother when Hitler came to power, as a result of concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to college; like other German boys, he hastily fell under the Fuhrer’s spell. So he was once crushed to be informed that, as a black child, he was once ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was once blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he would possibly hear the Gestapo banging at the door — or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic,, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi’s account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.