Most people visiting Kaliningrad find it hard to believe that the dreary, Sovietised slice of land sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania was once known as the jewel of East Prussia.

Inge’s War: A Story of Family, Secrets and Survival under Hitler
SVENJA O’DONNELL
(EBURY PRESS, 320 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Most people visiting Kaliningrad find it hard to believe that the dreary, Sovietised slice of land sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania was once known as the jewel of East Prussia. As the birthplace of Kant, Königsberg was a popular German holiday destination near the Baltic coast, famed for its amber jewellery, its handsome castle, its ancient university. When, in 1945, the Red Army arrived, it comprehensively wrecked the city, stripped it of its German identity and erected concrete Stalinist blocks where once genteel municipal buildings had stood.

In many ways, the life of Inge Wiegandt mirrored the brutal destruction of her birthplace. Yet she concreted over her physical and mental trauma and, like so many women in the Second World War, seemed destined to pass into history entirely forgotten until her journalist granddaughter paid an impulsive trip to Kaliningrad and phoned to report back. Svenja O’Donnell (inset), half-German, half-Irish, had always found Inge reserved, if not aloof, and ­reluctant to discuss her past. Yet her ­grandmother’s reaction to that telephone call sparked the gradual unspooling of a long-held family secret.

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