'The House By The Lake' Is A Story Of Reconciliation — And The Meaning Of Home
A few years ago, Thomas Harding wrote a memoir centered on what became of his great-grandparents' German house. Now he's made it into a children's book about belonging, with the home his protagonist.
A picture book about Nazi persecution, air raids and Communist secret police informants seems an unlikely children's bedtime story.
But The House by the Lake by Thomas Harding is also about belonging.
Adapted from his of the same name, Harding tells the tale of a house in the forested outskirts of Berlin and the four families — who were Jews, Nazis, refugees and Communists — that lived in it from 1927 to 1999. It's the story of a house that's stood in four different Germanys: The Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, Communist East Germany
