Wintergreen

Passau, a small Bavarian city situated along the border with Austria, had gone decades without acknowledging the roles—however small or large—its citizenry played in the atrocities of World War II. When Anna Rosmus attempted to rectify this oversight, she was met with praise from everywhere but Passau itself, where threats and vitriol from the local population eventually led her to emigrate from Germany to the United States. In Wintergreen, Rosmus writes of the prisoners of war and forced laborers, the Jews and other Eastern Europeans who lost their lives in Passau to the Nazi regime, and whose graves were hastily consigned to the cheapest plot of land in town.

Deftly researched and powerfully written, Wintergreen is a tragic history of the atrocities committed in and around Passau, a searing rebuke of those who seek to suppress them, and a moving tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and the importance of keeping their memory alive.