Her interrogative and unabashed voice explores the painful intersection of national duty and familial responsibilities…. “Willner’s epic memoir traverses three generations of mothers, recounting the tragedy, estrangement, and overwhelming courage of a family torn apart…. “An excellent and intriguing account of the impact of the Cold War on families and their lives on either side of the Berlin Wall.” - Library Journal (starred review) She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.Ī personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love-of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family.įorty Autumns is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white and color photographs.

In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story-five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control.

Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives-grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team-a bitter political war kept them apart. Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own. But the price of freedom-leaving behind her parents, eight siblings, and family home-was heartbreaking. At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany.

In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family-of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall.įorty Autumns makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two.

Forty autumns book review