The author, born in 1946 in Hamburg (now living in New York), describes her childhood and youth in the shadow of a past that was rarely spoken about, and her search for knowledge and understanding of the behavior of the older generation during the Nazi period, especially in relation to the most hushed-up subject of all, the Jews. also reports interviews in later years with her parents (passive anti-Nazis) and with some of her former teachers and family...

In a sensational tale of combat and an unlikely friendship in the flak-filled skies above Germany, Frater chronicles the life of U.S. Captain Werner Goering, an exceptional American pilot who was also thought to be the nephew of Herman Goering, leading member of the Nazi party and Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe.

"In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family--of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Forty Autumns makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. At twenty, Hanna escaped...