Originally published in Germany in 1997, Lotte Strauss's Over the Green Hill: Personal Memoir, Germany 1913-43, was begun in 1975 as a letter to her daughter. It took twenty years to write the complete story, and by then, was no longer a letter, but a book.
Lotte Strauss was born one year before the beginning of World War I. She spent her formative years observing how the mood of Post War Germany turned anti-Semitic. The Gestapo came for Strauss during October of 1942, stating that she was to join her parents on a 'resettlement' to the east. Realizing that to comply, that to take such orders would have dire consequences, Strauss managed to slip out the door of her apartment while the Gestapo's attention was momentarily diverted, and make it to her husband, Herbert in Berlin. The Strausses, together, spent the next six months hiding in Germany, planning for their escape, and continuing to evade the Gestapo by just seconds. In May, 1943, they managed to slip across the Swiss border.