Williams’ staggering autobiography of her WWII survival as a Russian Jew begins after Stalin’s 1930 collectivization, when famine and deadly epidemics overtook Kiev, and people stood in long ration lines for sawdust-fortified bread. As a child, she fled with her mother to rural Ukraine with its plentiful food and resilient peasants, and there she worked in the ambulance corps service ... Read moreduring the 1932 scarlet fever outbreak. Kiev’s food supplies eventually improved, but disgust with Stalin’s KGB provoked Sophia to defiantly identify herself as a Jew on her Soviet passport. Transferred at 17 from her government work in the city to relative safety inland, Williams remembers, 'No one dreamed how fast the Germans could reach the Dnieper or how bewildered we would be when they did.' She found wartime romance, retreated to Stalingrad, then tried to return to her mother in Kiev despite 'the wounds of war' and Nazi occupation. Her luck and pluck attested by this arresting account of wartime survival and postwar life command attention, reinforcing the fact that war in all its forms is hell.
Booklist
Williams' story is an intimate look at her survival in Russia and Germany during WWII. The daughter of a Roman Catholic and a Jew, at age 16—just a year before Germany would invade Russia in 1941—Williams unwittingly chose to list her nationality as 'Jewish' on her passport, 'an easy choice to make,' but one that would change her life. Williams spent the entirety of the war narrowly escaping the grasp of the Nazis, eventually immigrating to the U.S. in 1952.
Publishers Weekly
Escape into Danger provides unusual, intimate views of prewar Soviet life and German society during the war. Sophia’s descriptions, expectations, and interactions are detailed, colorful, and engaging. Her recklessness and lack of perspective are revealing, keeping the story true to her understanding of the time and the real danger that she faced.
Wendy Lower, Claremont McKenna College Sophia’s retelling is so vivid, and the book so successfully transports the reader back into the world of Sophia's youth, that your imagination doesn't trust what the cold logic of your intellect is telling you. . . . [This] is one of the all-time great stories, one of those true stories that no fictional writer could ever sell convincingly because some life goes beyond what art can imitate. . . . Williams takes you back to her world as a teenaged Ukrainian Jewish girl caught in Ukraine's national nightmare of Nazi occupation—yet [this world] is not a nightmare world. Looking back sixty years later, with the wisdom of eighty years in her pocket, Williams manages to recreate for the reader the . . . always charming teenager who was too busy falling in and out of love and friendship—too busy living—to be always dwelling on the Damoclean sword looming over her days. . . . This is no mean feat for a first-time author writing in her fifth language.
Ken Pierce, blogger Show Less