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Kurt's "opa"--or grandfather--has never been willing to talk about his time as a German soldier and Kurt has a deep feeling of anxiety about what he might have done during the war. He thinks of films he's seen, like Schindler's List, and hopes his grandfather couldn't have been involved in atrocities. Spending a year in Germany seems like a good chance to find out more, or at least to improve his German.

One day he visits the graveyard in the town he's living in (just outside Berlin) and an old man speaks to him, calling him by his grandfather's name, which was also Kurt Schreiber. In time Kurt gets to know this man, who is the only one who can tell him all about his grandfather's time in the war--because he was there.

Kurt learns about his grandfather's childhood in the Hitler Youth and his time in the German army on the Eastern Front. Herr Brandt doesn't try to minimize the horror of those times or to absolve himself of responsibility as a soldier, but through his story, Kurt comes to understand how as children and later as young men the two were drawn into participation in a war based on lies. This wonderfully written and carefully researched novel tells a story that illuminates history and fills in the texture and complexity that lie behind the bare facts.

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