You Have No Idea: A Memoir

by Barbara Mueller Walling and Gillian L Mueller

Born on a small farm in rural Poland, Barbara Mueller Walling left home at the outbreak of World War II, fleeing to German-occupied Warsaw to evade Nazi conscription into forced labor in the Third Reich. She was 17. Working as a waitress in a chic German restaurant, she fell in love with its owner, Edmund Mueller, who was 28 years her senior. The war had rendered Edmund-a Pole of German descent-precariously neither Pole, nor German. This afforded him opportunities to rescue, among others, two of Barbara's siblings from German persecution and to relocate his family to Vienna, Austria to escape slaughter in the Warsaw Uprising. It also, however, rendered him vulnerable to false arrests by the Gestapo and the opposing Allied Forces. Stripped of wealth and possessions, the family emigrated to the U.S. in 1951 with the clothes on their backs and their suitcases packed with bed linens. They settled in Los Angeles, where Barbara and Edmund struggled to rebuild a decent life for their children. This is a highly personal account-yet classic American story-of the couple's survival as war refugees and ?migr?s to the land of hope and opportunity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1481225189
• ISBN13: 9781481225182
• Release Date: May 2013
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 2.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 0.9" x 8.0"