When Bettina Flitner returns to Celle for a reading from her book My Sister – to the very place where her mother was buried 40 years ago – questions she had long kept at bay suddenly ambush her with unexpected force: questions about the great misfortune in her mother’s life, and about a family catastrophe that unfolded long ago in a distant place.
And so, Bettina Flitner embarks on a journey full of surprises and revelations to the spa resort Wölfelsgrund in former Lower Silesia – now Międzygórze, Poland – where her ancestors once owned and ran a sanatorium, until their dramatic escape in 1946. Drawing from her journey to present-day Poland, old family diaries and documents, and her own memories of her mother’s life, Flitner weaves nothing less than a literary masterpiece: a gripping family narrative that becomes both a belated act of reconciliation with her mother and a testament to the redemptive power of memory and precise storytelling.
