Little, Brown has just published Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany by Marie Jalowicz Simon, who discarded her yellow star and disappeared into the underground in World War II Berlin. The book's U.S. editor, Tracy Behar, first heard about the book in an unusual way: "My son's friend spends his summers in Berlin with his family. His father, Tom Ertman, is German and a sociology professor at New York University who teaches Third Reich history. Last summer we visited Tom and his wife, historian Susan Pedersen. They are both published authors, so we got to talking about books. Tom started to describe one he had recently finished, a bestseller in Germany, about a young Jewish Berliner who had managed to escape forced labor, deportation and extermination, all while living underground. I could have listened to him for hours; the memoir sounded extraordinary, and unusual in its detailed depiction of what it was like to live in the heart of Nazi Germany during the war."
She made a note to research the book later, but "I hadn't been back at the office for more than a week before an e-mail appeared from agent George Lucas at Inkwell with about 20,000 words of the book in English. George represents Profile Books in the U.K., and they were publishing the book the following spring. So it was really pure coincidence. And a very happy coincidence at that, because I had also acquired Tom Buergenthal's astonishing Holocaust memoir A Lucky Child five years earlier from George and Profile, and it has been extremely successful for us. It felt like kismet."
Behar continued: "It is an absolutely remarkable account of a Jewish woman's daily life in the epicenter of the Third Reich. I've never read anything like it. It's also an important historical document that I believe will be read long into the future. I know this might sound crazy, but I really felt that the book belonged to me and to Little, Brown, and so I jumped in very quickly to acquire it before anyone else had the chance." --Marilyn Dahl, editor, Shelf Awareness for Readers