Julie Lindahl Livres

Exploring her family's dark legacy, Julie Lindahl embarks on a six-year quest across Germany, Poland, Paraguay, and Brazil to uncover her grandparents' involvement with the SS during the Third Reich. As she confronts the profound guilt that haunts her lineage, she reveals her grandfather's brutal actions in occupied Poland and his subsequent escape to South America. The pendulum used by her grandmother symbolizes the search for truth amid moral ambiguity, while the kindness of strangers reshapes Julie's understanding of her family's past and her own identity.

This gripping memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl's journey to uncover her grandparents' roles in the Third Reich as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler's elite, the SS. Out of the unbearable heart of the story--the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations--emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth. In a remarkable six-year journey through Germany, Poland, Paraguay, and Brazil, Julie uncovers, among many other discoveries, that her grandfather had been a fanatic member of the SS since 1934. During World War II, he was responsible for enslavement and torture and was complicit in the murder of the local population on the large estates he oversaw in occupied Poland. He eventually fled to South America to evade a new wave of war-crimes trials. The pendulum used by Julie's grandmother to divine good from bad and true from false becomes a symbol for the elusiveness of truth and morality, but also for the false securities we cling to when we become unmoored. As Julie delves deeper into the abyss of her family's secret, discovering history anew, one precarious step at a time, the compassion of strangers is a growing force that transforms her world and the way that she sees her family--and herself.