What the Nazis did to Germany’s Jews – and others – is something we should never, ever forget, one of those lessons that history offers us and that we should take to heart. Paul O’Connor has found an unusual, and he, says, outstanding addition to the literature available about what happened during those terrible times.

Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor

THE HOUSE AT SCHUMANNSTRASSE 7. By Edith Netter. Maine Authors Publishing. 173 pages, softcover. $19.95.

On the morning of Nov. 9, 1938, the Netter family of Goppingen, Germany, was making breakfast. Alice was preparing apple fritters with her daughter, Isolde. The family’s patriarch, Heinrich, read the morning news in his study. Netta, a long-time family maid, was helping in the kitchen. Then someone pounded on the front door.

Thus begins Alice Netter’s Holocaust ordeal. Nazi stormtroopers seized her husband and intimidated her. Later that night, they returned to cast her and Isolde into the street, telling them to find a place to live on their own, because their house at Schumannstrasse 7 was needed by the Reich. This is Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” during which Nazis rampaged against the nation’s Jews, their institutions and businesses.

Edith Netter, Alice’s granddaughter and a retired lawyer living in Belmont, Mass., spent years tracking down her family’s history. She talked with friends and family, including her grandmother. She read books and conducted primary research. She visited Germany, France, England and Portugal and traced the family’s journeys. In the end, she wove together a compelling story of the Netter family’s determination to escape from the Nazis and to survive the war.

The author considers her memoir a piece of creative nonfiction, but it violates one of the principal tenets of that genre, what creative writing publisher Lee Gutkind used as the title for his seminal guide: “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.” To truthfully tell the story as a compelling narrative, Netter reconstructs dialogue to give voice to Alice as the first-person narrator.

I’m willing to forgive her because this book is so fabulous. If I were her confessor, I’d assign a penance of three Hail Marys and an Our Father. (That’s an inside Catholic joke in a review about a Jewish family. Probably inappropriate.)

The pages are full of tension. What will happen to Alice and Isolde when they are cast out of their home? Has Alice’s son, who was living in Stuttgart, been seized by the Nazis? Where is Heinrich?

Netter may be recreating scenes for which she has only general notes, but they are gripping, and they ring true. At one point, during the one hour Alice and Isolde have to evacuate their home, I wanted to reach through the pages and shake young Isolde, tell her to get ahold of herself and to pack as much as she can because time is running out.

There are other equally nerve-racking scenes as, one by one, the children and other relatives and friends seek asylum outside Germany and then Alice, herself, takes what was called a “sealed train” from Berlin to Lisbon, Portugal, and, she hopes, a subsequent cruise to New York.

This is not an easy book to find. Maine Authors Publishing did not connect with a national distribution effort, at least not at the time that I searched for it. About the only way to get the book, unless one lives in Maine, is through Amazon.  I know about it only because my sister also lives in Belmont, Mass., and she has befriended the author.

Today readers have a considerable library of stories about the Holocaust. But with Alice Netter’s story we have one of the few, if not the first, about the sealed trains to Portugal. It’s a terrific read.

• Paul T. O’Connor is a retired journalist and journalism professor whose first book, “The Missing Child,” will be published in April by Torchflame Books.