The File on Fraulein Berg (Signature)

The File on Fraulein Berg (Signature)

by JoanLingard (Author)

Synopsis

1944 Belfast. Fraulein Berg arrives to teach German at Kate, Harriet and Sally's school. Saturated with war-time propaganda, reading spy stories and imagining themselves dropping over enemy lines to perform daring and heroic deeds, the girls decide that, as she's German, she must be the enemy - and she must be a spy. They set to work to prove it, following her everywhere, recording everything in notebooks, hounding her, seeing themselves as valiant secret service agents helping their country. Finally on a train travelling between Dublin and Belfast, they alert a border guard ... The story is told by Kate years later, always haunted by their silly antics at the time, and often wondering what happened, in the end, to the unhappy Fraulein Berg. In fact, she was a Jewish escapee from Nazi Germany, having lost parents, two sisters and a brother in the gaschambers. Kate reflects that, so used to dividing people up into Protestants and Catholics, enemies and friends, they had never stopped to think of the tragedy they might be creating..

First published in 1980 by Julia MacRae Books

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 160
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Hodder Children's Books
Published: 20 Jan 2000

ISBN 10: 0340764643
ISBN 13: 9780340764640
Children’s book age: 12+ Years

Media Reviews
The welcome re-issue of a novel set in Belfast during the Second World War. Although set in the past, the subject - the terrorising of someone simply on the basis of ignorant suspicion - is resoundingly contemporary. * The Scotsman, July 2000 *
powerful and disturbing * Shelf Life, issue 15, Winter 2000 *
Author Bio
Joan Lingard was born in Edinburgh but grew up in Belfast. She has had a long and varied career in children's books, and was awarded the M.B.E. In 1998 for services to children's literature. She writes with equal success for teenagers, adults and the very young.