Born in 1944 near Pirmasens, the author based this documentary novel dealing with the entrapment, entanglement and eviction of an entire village on close reading of the sources and conversations with people who lived through the events. On 15 March 1939, Hitler’s armies marched into the “Rump of Czechoslovakia” (“Resttschechei”). The Iglau (Jihlava) district was a German-speaking island in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands, and the Germans there celebrated the invasion as liberation. After a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, there are arrests and the synagogue burns down. Not far from Iglau, in the German farming village of Bergersdorf, the Gestapo arrest the Czech miller. The SS-General Gottlob Berger comes from Berlin for a visit and pronounces “his” Bergersdorf an SS village. This is the beginning of the road to disaster...