Refuge & From Fear to Freedom

As a ten-year-old girl, Liane Guddat watched Hitler’s motorcade pass by their home in Insterburg, East Prussia. Within a few short months, Insterburg was smoldering in ruins when Mutti (Liane’s mother) and her four children scrambled over bricks, broken glass, and scorched beams as they tried to escape the ravages of WWII. Although not a Nazi, Liane’s father had been drafted into the German army and became a prisoner of war.
Hitler’s Third Reich of Germany, in its corruption and despotism, subjected many of its own people to terrible abuse before it began to crumble, abandoning them to a new kind of holocaust. Despite brutal treatment, harsh conditions, near starvation, and bodies riddled with boils, when others around them languished in despair, God brought great glory to Himself through the lives of His faithful servants. Liane tells the true story of her East Prussian family’s steadfast faith and struggle for survival amidst the horror of Russian invasion and occupation in her autobiographies Refuge and From Fear to Freedom.
In her award-winning books, Liane Guddat Brown proclaims God’s sustaining grace proven through a family torn apart by war. “We still thank the Lord for bringing us to America,” she says. “For it was only by His grace that we survived at all, and even more, that we would be allowed to live among the most privileged people in the world.”