Escape into Danger

The True Story of a Kievan Girl in World War II

By (author) Sophia Orlovsky Williams

Publication date:

22 December 2011

Length of book:

328 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442214682

Escape into Danger tells the remarkable story of a young girl’s perilous adventures and coming of age during World War II. Born in Kiev to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, Sophia Williams chose to be identified as Jewish when she was eligible for a Soviet passport, mandatory at the age of sixteen, little realizing the life-changing consequences of her decision. Only seventeen when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Sophia left Kiev, unwittingly escaping the Babi Yar massacre. On her journey into Russia, she fled from flooding, dodged fires and bombs, and fell in love. At Stalingrad, Sophia turned back in a futile attempt to return home to her mother. Stranded in a Nazi-occupied town, accepted as a Russian, she found work with a sympathetic German officer and felt secure until a local girl recognized her as a Jew. Within days, Sophia’s boss spirited her to safety with his family in Poland. Soon, though, Sophia was on the run again, this time to Nazi Germany, where, befriended by Germans and Hungarians, she somehow escaped detection through the rest of the war. She met and married a like-minded German soldier and started a family and business. The business thrived in post-war Germany, but the marriage deteriorated. She divorced her adulterous husband, but the vindictive, even homicidal Guido continued to dog her steps. Throughout, Sophia maintained her grit, charm, and optimism, the qualities that saved her as she time and again made her “escape into danger.”

Part I: Spring of Youth 1 Full of Spunk
2 “Let It Rot!”
3 Politics
4 Internationalka
5 An Omen Fulfilled
Part II: The Steppes Aflame
6 Partings
7 Flagship Stalin
8 Narrow Escapes
9 Flight to the East
10 The Turning Point
11 My Purse!
12 Stranded
13 Waiting for the Enemy
Part III: German Occupation
14 Facing the Invaders
15 To Register—or Not?
16 A Promotion
17 “You Haven’t Lost Everything.”
18 German Studies
19 A Lamb in Spring
20 Rescued
Part IV: Eye of the Hurricane 21 On a Nazi Train
22 “Good Little Farmer”
23 A Red Silk Camisole
24 Lord of the Manor
25 Red Cross Nurse
26 The Truth Comes Out
Part V: Inside Nazi Germany 27 Nemesis on Horseback
28 Found!
29 A Proposal
30 Beethoven’s Fifth
31 Hope
32 Half-Crazy, or in Love
33 Crisscrossing the Third Reich
34 “Imagine, Running into You!”
35 Off to the Alps
Part VI: Postwar Germany 36 Liberated by the Americans
37 A Changed Man
38 Ten Centimes Short
39 Pedaling through the Slush
40 A Twenty-Mark Fine
41 In the Cards
42 Bird in a Maze
43 A Double Rainbow

Williams’ staggering autobiography of her WWII survival as a Russian Jew begins after Stalin’s 1930 collectivization, when famine and deadly epidemics overtook Kiev, and people stood in long ration lines for sawdust-fortified bread. As a child, she fled with her mother to rural Ukraine with its plentiful food and resilient peasants, and there she worked in the ambulance corps service during the 1932 scarlet fever outbreak. Kiev’s food supplies eventually improved, but disgust with Stalin’s KGB provoked Sophia to defiantly identify herself as a Jew on her Soviet passport. Transferred at 17 from her government work in the city to relative safety inland, Williams remembers, 'No one dreamed how fast the Germans could reach the Dnieper or how bewildered we would be when they did.' She found wartime romance, retreated to Stalingrad, then tried to return to her mother in Kiev despite 'the wounds of war' and Nazi occupation. Her luck and pluck attested by this arresting account of wartime survival and postwar life command attention, reinforcing the fact that war in all its forms is hell.