- Rosemarie Lengsfeld Turke

Compiling countless hours of painstaking research, American Shoes is a profound mosaic of memories recounting twelve years in the childhood of American-born Rosemarie Lengsfeld, trapped with her family inside Nazi Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler, the reign of the Nazi party, and the entirety of World War II. Set against a backdrop of a country polarized by ethnic and political hatred, American Shoes follows the breakdown of a society from a child’s point of view, inside a land that turned against itself—where millions of citizens are targeted as threats, and then removed for extermination.

Vividly told for the first time after seven decades of a family’s collective silence, American Shoes recounts the story of an American girl nicknamed “Rosel,” a spirited young girl who refused to accept the new order of a society gone mad. Perceived to be one of Hitler’s threats, anticipating discovery by the Nazi secret police, Rosel and her family find themselves caught in a world that quickly became more macabre and sinister than any child’s nightmare could ever be — a world where resistance or opposition meant incarceration if not certain death.

Fighting to see through a barrage of Nazi propaganda, compelled to keep her American identity secret for fear of her family’s arrest or worse, this is the story of a brave girl who refused to inhale the Nazi lies and hatred. Driven only by the faint memories of the land where she was born, American Shoes is the heart-wrenching, terrifying and ultimately triumphant memoir of Rosel and her family’s relentless struggle to survive, as a cataclysmic war marches closer and closer until it is upon them.