Forty Autumns

Growing up in a provincial village outside of Berlin, Hanna was encouraged by her schoolteacher father to follow her dreams. But at the end of World War II, the Soviets took control of the eastern part of Germany and established a repressive communist state?East Germany?which used brutal force and a massive wall to cut off East from West.Determined to live free, Hanna made a dangerous escape to West Germany. But the price of freedom?leaving behind her parents, her eight siblings, and her home?was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband, a U.S. Army officer, and had children of her own, but she never forgot her parents and siblings trapped on the other side of the Berlin Wall.Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna's daughter, Nina Willner, became the first female U.S. Army intelligence officer to lead sensitive intelligence collection operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though separated by only a few miles, American Nina and her German relatives were kept apart, leaving a family divided for more than four decades by a bitter political war.Nina takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under communist rule, revealing both the harsh reality her relatives endured and her experiences as an intelligence officer running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.