To Hansi, this was a moment of desperation. He had to find a way to get through the Wall—the concrete Wall with its mass of barbed and tangled wires that so cruelly and heartlessly separates the German people. This was his mother's dying wish.

Determined to escape from communist-controlled East Berlin, to West Berlin and freedom, Hansi, feeling pangs of hunger, gripped with fear, searched for the right spot, waited for the right moment. And while he searched and waited—he thought . . .

It all happened so suddenly—his father arrested—his mother gone. Never before had he known that his father was an escaped Russian prisoner; that his parents had been living in East Berlin under an assumed name. Why—why then, had they remained all these years? Hansi did not understand.

School, with its rigid military training, taught him that the State was everything. His parents taught him to trust in God. And not many hours ago, he had seen a boy shot, trying to escape; an old woman jump from a rooftop to freedom; a mother's tears as she waved to her daughter about to be married on the other side of the Wall. Would he ever know truth from falsehood? Hansi was confused.

The conflict between East and West Berlin—the German people divided—dramatizes the difference between the free world and the communist world. Readers of this tense and moving story—written with realism and understanding by Alida Malkus, one of our most distinguished children's authors—are made aware of the contrast between Hansi's life in Germany and theirs in America, and will be thankful for their multiple rights and freedoms.

From the dust jacket