Reviews for Trek

“Trek is as dramatic as a very good movie, full of heart, drama and heroism. You do not have to be interested in history to be enthralled by this story of an American woman who married a German she’d met while he was studying at Harvard and, with her two small children, found herself caught in Germany during World War II.”
—Nicholas von Hoffman, columnist for the New York Observer, author of Citizen Cohn and other books

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“Trek is an extraordinary document written in beautiful prose with a story as gripping as a spy thriller. It gives us a window into the lives of ordinary Germans during the terrible years of World War II that is wonderfully moving even as it is disturbing. Mary Jentsch was an astute observer, alert to all the novelistic details of the world around her as she struggled to survive with her two young children in small villages of northeast Germany during the war. Her story is at once a compelling entertainment and a profound lesson for our times: that civilized good people can be deceived and then forced into cooperating with an evil regime, realizing only too late how profoundly they have been compromised by the very traits they thought made them socially responsible—loyalty and familial bonds.”
—Mary Breasted, novelist and author of Why Should You Doubt Me Now?

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“This dramatic tale of survival in Nazi Germany during World War II comes with a twist. It was written by an American wife and mother, Mary Hunt Jentsch, who left Geneva with her German husband in 1940, only to be caught behind enemy lines for the duration of the war. How she and her two small children survived—first the Allied bombing of Berlin, and then the nightmarish trek across the countryside in search of safety and food as Russian tanks closed in—makes for a compelling read.”
—Annalyn Swan, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, de Kooning: An American Master