Sigrid MacRae
Sigrid MacRae holds a graduate degree in Art History from Columbia University, and has worked as a researcher, translater, editor, and consultant. She is the co-author of Alliance of Enemies, a book about the undercover and unfortunately unsuccessful collaboration between OSS and the German Resistance to end WWII. She writes on art and history and lives in New York.
"A World Elsewhere is a literary masterpiece, fully realized and a perfect work of art, a daughter's eloquent monument to her courageous mother. It is also a reminder that war spares no one but wounds everyone it touches. " —Edmund White
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Books
A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany
The extraordinary love story of an American blueblood and a German aristocrat—and a riveting tale of survival in wartime Germany.
Sigrid MacRae never knew her father, until a trove of letters revealed not only him, but also the singular story of her parents’ intercontinental love affair. While visiting Paris
in 1927, her American mother, Aimée, raised in a wealthy Connecticut family, falls in love with a charming, sophisticated Baltic German baron, a penniless exile of the Russian revolution. They marry. But the harsh reality of post–World War I Germany is inescapable: a bleak economy and the rise of Hitler quash Heinrich’s diplomatic ambitions, and their struggling family farm north of Berlin drains Aimée’s modest fortune. In 1941, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front and is killed by a sniper. Widowed, living in a country soon at war with her own, Aimée must fend for herself. With home and family in jeopardy, she and her six young children flee the advancing.
Russian army in an epic journey, back to the country she thought she’d left behind.
A World Elsewhere is a stirring narrative of two hostages to history and a mother’s courageous fight to save her family.
(Penguin Books, September 2014)