Like other twelve-year-old girls, Jutta Salzberg enjoyed playing with friends, going to school, and visiting relatives. In Germany in 1938, these everyday activities were dangerous for Jews. Jutta and her family tried to lead normal lives, but soon they knew they had to escape-if they could, before it was too late.
Throughout 1938, Jutta had her friends and relatives fill her poesiealbum-her autograph book-with inscriptions. Her daughter, Debbie Levy, used these entries as a springboard for telling the story of the Salzberg family's last year in Germany. It was a year of change and chance, confusion and cruelty. It was a year of goodbyes.
The author's mother's 1938 autograph book filled with inscriptions from family and friends is the inspiration for a collection of narrative poems about life in Nazi Germany for a Jewish family trying to escape the horrors.
