Susan Schenkel

An Improbable Journey: a True Story of Courage and Survival During World War II Susan Schenkel

Publisher Marketing: A wealthy, prominent German-Jewish family was torn apart, first by suicide, then by Hitler. At sixteen, Siddi, the youngest, was left on her own in Nazi Germany. Through an extraordinary chain of events, she found herself in Central Asia. Leon, a handsome Polish Jew, worked his way up from poverty to become a successful salesman. Through an equally extraordinary chain of events, he also found himself in Central Asia. Siddi and Leon met and fell in love in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Together, they struggled to survive hunger, homelessness, deadly epidemics, a black market economy, and Soviet police harassment. After the war, they managed to get from Central Asia to a displaced persons camp in Southern Germany. Along the way, they had a baby. Incredibly, in the DP camp, this Jewish couple developed an enduring friendship, which defied the hatreds of the time, with a German woman and put their baby girl into her care. An Improbable Journey presents the historical context and provides many vignettes that describe Siddi and Leon's different worlds and the people in them: the sister who met King Edward VIII; the puritanical daughter of a brothel owner; the Jewish best friend who survived living underground in Berlin. An Improbable Journey is a story of the triumph of the human spirit. It is a story about people who beat incredible odds and about the courage, love, friendship, and hope that keep the human race going. Susan Schenkel, Ph. D. is a psychologist and a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of Giving Away Success: Why Women Get Stuck And What To Do About It and has been interviewed on radio and television and in magazines and newspapers across America. She has also been a clinical instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She wrote An Improbable Journey to share Leon and Siddi's story of love and hope.