“Ordinary people have a story to tell” – The Luck of the Weissensteiners: “Interesting WWII perspective”

Here are the highlights of the latest reviews for my historical novel THE LUCK OF THE WEISSENSTEINERS:5.0 out of 5 stars I’m not a history buff but enjoyed the details incorporated into the book., February 19, 2015By Terri martin     Verified Purchase While the story started slow, it didn’t take long for me to be pulled into the lives portrayed in the story.

5.0 out of 5 stars Ordinary people have a story to tell., February 19, 2015

By

Kathy Waters – 

 

Verified Purchase

For years authors concentrated their efforts in writing about the big events and people of history, totally ignoring the millions of people who were affected by decisions made out of their controller. These people have their own stories to tell and are as important in the grand scheme of life as the decision makers. There are a lot more ordinary people than there are people at the top. Without all those at the bottom, the top people would not exist. This book does a very good job of painting a picture of some of these ordinary people and how they survived the chaos of WWII in a part of the world of which one rarely reads. It portrays the resilience of the human nature.

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, February 19, 2015

By

L. Wallace (AZ) –  

 

Verified Purchase

Just finished this novel and just loved it! It was wonderfully written in third party form. This was my first book with a setting in Europe during the Hitler period. The build up of the characters, locations and the history kept me intrigued.

5.0 out of 5 stars nice, February 18, 2015

By

Al Stafford – 

Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

Great book. Very interesting. Easy to read

4.0 out of 5 stars Lucky pick…, February 17, 2015

By

martha marie pinkerton 

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What a fine and well written story of the trials of WW11 Slovakian Jews and the ever hopeful Weissensteiners.
Readers of Historical Fiction will enjoy this fine read and look for more from an author ti be watched.

4.0 out of 5 stars Book 1, February 16, 2015

By

azsue40 – See all my reviews

 

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An enjoyable read from the era of WWII and the ongoing struggle of a Jewish family as they outwit the force of Hitler and his soldiers.

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting WWII perspective, February 16, 2015

By

Karen – 

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This book just pulled me in although sometimes the reading got a bit tedious. Very interesting in that it exposes the reader to perspectives of individual people who were forced to endure intolerable conditions where they had little or no control. The interactions and human frailties and strengths were fascinating. Politics, voting and staying engaged in your country’s ruling class’s actions as painful as that may be at times is vital to freedom. Today, so many take it for granted.

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly absorbing., February 15, 2015

By

Wussyboy (Surrey) – 

As a typical first-generation exile child from WWII (my Hungarian mother was an exile and so was my Polish father), I came to this book with considerable interest. And learnt a lot. Mr Fischer has done a remarkable job in reconstructing a turbulent period of history – from 1932 to 1945 – of which little first-hand experience remains. It almost feels like the ‘lucky’ Weissensteiners, whose luck owes as much to their innate optimism and naivete than to mere happenstance, are a real family, so well researched is this excellent and highly readable book. As honest and ever-resourceful weaver Jonah (‘one lucky Schmuck’) and his daughters Greta and Wilma reel from one near calamity to the next, all the way from the Ukraine to Slovakia to Germany, and struggle to survive the Jew-hating pograms aimed at their kind, the reader is drawn into an open-mouthed astonishment at how, for one short decade, bigotry and racism ruled the Western world and managed to destroy so much of it. Fischer’s skill is that we really care for the characters, flawed though some of them (like Johanna and the Countess) are, and manages to skirt the thin line between high drama and pithy pathos so effectively. I remember my mother telling me of the day she returned from church to her home in Budapest, only to find it flattened by American chain bombs. ‘Well,’ she remarked stoically to a friend, ‘that’s life!’ This is the tone and the beauty of this book. There are no frills or pretensions here. In a world gone mad, where people changed religion in order to survive, and where families lost everything overnight, shrugged, and just carried on, this is exactly how it must have been.

4.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Perspective, February 15, 2015

By

Ruth L Christy  

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It’s amazing how bigotry and disdain for human differences follow from generation to the next, yet no civilization ever seems to learn the lessons of history. This story is sad, provocative and told from perspectives that are often lost to the pages of history. Then again maybe that’s why lessons are never learned.

The Luck of the Weissensteiners (Three Nations Trilogy Book 1) 

In the sleepy town of Bratislava in 1933 a romantic girl falls for a bookseller from Berlin. Greta Weissensteiner, daughter of a Jewish weaver, slowly settles in with the Winkelmeier clan just as the developments in Germany start to make waves in Europe and re-draws the visible and invisible borders. The political climate in the multifaceted cultural jigsaw puzzle of disintegrating Czechoslovakia becomes more complex and affects relations between the couple and the families. The story follows them through the war with its predictable and also its unexpected turns and events and the equally hard times after.
But this is no ordinary romance; in fact it is not a romance at all, but a powerful, often sad, Holocaust story. What makes The Luck of the Weissensteiners so extraordinary is the chance to consider the many different people who were never in concentration camps, never in the military, yet who nonetheless had their own indelible Holocaust experiences. This is a wide-ranging, historically accurate exploration of the connections between social location, personal integrity and, as the title says, luck.

On Amazon:  http://smarturl.it/Weissensteiners

AT ODDS WITH DESTINY http://BookShow.me/B00SHYGG7C/