by Lydia Penner   SOMETIMES BOOKS TAKE you to new lands, lead you to new ideas. Other times, you are taken to places you have been to and have known before; and if it is a good book, the landscape is deepened and you understand it in a new way. Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi was for me the second type of book. I am a second generation Canadian, my parents having immigrated here as young adults right after the Second World War. Before I was born, I lost three grandparents, and several aunts and uncles (some lost, some murdered, some mysteriously disappeared), all due to this war. In the church where I was raised, the pews where the women sat were filled with older ladies who, like my Oma, lost their husbands during the war years. Yes, war had affected my family deeply, yet it was seldom spoken of, aside from a few "war stories" my father told us around the campfire. The war was a landscape that had shaped my life, and yet I knew very little about it. Stones From the River linked me to my past, and painted this landscape for me. It was like I saw the Hitler history from the inside out for the first time and Hegi has done me a great service for this alone. The story is about a dwarf woman, Trudi Montag, growing up in Germany. The book spans the years 1915-1952, so it covers both wars. Even though my parents grew up in a German-speaking pocket of Russia, I read what it could have been like for them growing up during the war, going through the Hitler years and then beyond them. I understood what it must have been like for Germans; how years of obedience to authority previous to the war left them with the dubious task of obeying Hitler, at least on the surface. Just as Trudi learned to keep secrets, so the German people learned to hide what they really thought. The book confronted my own mixed feelings of being German. I found out that I am not alone in the silence after the war, but even more important, the silence has been broken by Trudi's story. Where before the landscape was sketchy and black and white, it is now imbued with color and three-dimensions. I would recommend this book especially to anyone whose background is German. You can respond to the author here (responses may be posted) or on our messageboard.