Letters to a Prisoner of War

Some of the letters published in this volume were first published by the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German (SCALG) and were very well received in the US. In 2010 they were published in book form in Germany for the first time. Those letters show what happened during World War II not only to the soldiers fighting on the front, but also to those waiting at home, the families. And, once, the war was over, the struggle for survival continued, in the prisoner camps, and at home for the starving families, who wait for the prisoners to come home.

Gerda Nischan was born in Frankenthal in the Palatinate in 1940 and attended local schools until she left for Switzerland in 1958. Later she moved to England to attend an International Language School to further her education. In 1967 she left for the United States to work at the German Consulate in Philadelphia. After her move to North Carolina she started writing seriously, joined the East Carolina University Poetry Forum; she published many of her poems in Poetry Journals, and started giving readings of her work in the US as well as in Germany. She has been a member of the Society for Contemporary Literature in German (SCALG) for many years and was invited to become a member of the P.E.N. Zentrum International in 2013. Her book „Briefe an einen Kriegsgefangenen“ was published in 2010 by the August von Goethe Literaturverlag in Frankfurt. Her first novel in German, „Dieses neue Leben“, was published in 2013, also by the August von Goethe Literaturverlag in Frankfurt. In June 2014 she read her work at the 80-year conference of the P.E.N. International Conference in Los Angeles. She is presently working on her new novel.