Life Behind the Wall: Candy Bombers, Beetle Bunker, and Smuggler’s Treasure

This is really three separate yet inter-related books in one volume. In the first book Candy Bombers, Erich and Katarina live in Berlin, several years after WWII. While trying to steal food from an American plane, Erich is caught by Fred DeWitt, a newspaper man for the U.S Air Force. Unsure about the American, Erich faces some serious decisions as a result of the strong friendship developed between DeWitt and Erich’s war-widowed mother. In Beetle Bunker, Sabine finds an abandoned bomb shelter. First it is just a place where polio-stricken Sabine can be alone, but it suddenly turns into somewhere she and her family can escape from Communist East Germany into American West Germany. In the last book Smuggler’s Treasure, Liesl has to write a paper on the Berlin Wall for school. While researching, she finds out what truly happened to her American grandfather.

I liked the comprehension questions and pages on how the history actually happened at the end of each book. I also liked how the first book began with a prequel that was inter-related to another book, and how everyone in each book was related (Sabine was Erich’s half-sister, Liesl was Sabine’s daughter).