A Private Treason

A Private Treason is the memoir of a courageous German woman who, as a girl of nineteen from an upper-middle-class Gentile family, rejected Nazism completely and gave up her language and her country forever. Branded a “traitor,” she fled from the blitzkrieg to Vienna, the Dalmation islands, Paris, finally to the zone libre in southern France—a fugitive’s life preserved by forged identity papers and haunted by the fear of detention and arrest. Yet she managed to survive.

Now, she looks back on the war and her youth. Her intense, personal memories are recalled in fragments—she tells each one honestly and with powerful emotion, including her childhood in Berlin and the liberation of France in 1944. She recalls her neighborhood amid Berlin’s plentiful parks and lakes and as she matures, we see her first perceptions of the ominous moods and events beginning to shake Germany—the deep resentment over losing World War I, the vicious gossip of “hereditary enemies,” the first outburst of political and racial violence that would eventually be transformed into hobnailed boots, truncheons, and swastika armbands, separating her from schoolmates and playmates forever.

A Private Treason is filled with poignant recollections of the people in her life: her strict, deeply Teutonic grandfather—target of her childhood rebellions with his haughty refinement and tyrannical whims—who finally expresses his love openly just before she leaves Germany; her gentle, withdrawn father and talented, emotionally unstable mother; Loirette, a clever, myopic Vichy official secretly working for the Resistance; and André, her intellectual lover, continually frustrated in his attempts to work effectively for the maquis.

Much of A Private Treason tells the story of Ingrid and André’s struggle to stay alive and together, of their separations and reunions, of her transporting forged papers for the maquis and his plotting to escape to England, of the enormous risks they both took to hide their comrades and condemned refugees, and of their hope, finally fulfilled, for the Allied invasion that would eventually drive the Germans out of France. A few days after the invasion begins, André is killed in one of the last military actions in the Vercors.

In its story of suffering and personal grief, A Private Treason denounces all wars. Yet, at the same time, Ingrid Greenburger’s strength and natural exuberance shine throughout this stirring account of one woman’s response to the outrages of war and Nazism.

The late Ingrid Greenburger was the widow of literary agent Sanford Greenburger.