Out Now: "My Name Was Five: A Novel of the Second World War" by Heinz Kohler
"My Name Was Five" is being heralded as "A psychological tour de force" "A haunting chronicle of war and its aftermath."


MINNEAPOLIS, MN, January 17, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- When a private plane crashes in Florida in 1991, the surviving pilot makes the strangest of remarks. "It was World War II," he says. Thus begins Heinz Kohler's new novel My Name Was Five (Mill City Press, ISBN 978-1-936107-37-7, December 2009, $17.95), which will grip you from beginning to end. While the National Transportation Safety Board attributes the accident to a collision with birds, one stubborn investigator rightly suspects there is more to the story.

My Name Was Five reveals how the pilot's past had trailed him on his last flight and vividly brings to life a terrifying slice of history-the story of a German boy who grows up in Berlin before, during, and after the Second World War, whose father ends up in a concentration camp, while an uncle is fervently cleansing Hitler's capital of every last Jew. The boy's mother is the one who keeps him sane when Spitfire guns kill his best friend standing right next to him on a bridge. But worse is to come: bombings and firestorms, the senseless sacrifice of children and old men in the battle of Berlin, and then the Soviet occupation, along with rape, murder, hunger, and disease. In the end, we come upon an unexpected twist that shows how the consequences of war can emerge decades later and in faraway places.

"In novelistic form, this is a riveting child's-eye account of growing up in Germany under the Nazis and then the Russians. Laced with extraordinary photos and posters from those times, it combines memory with testimony." - David R. Mayhew, Sterling Professor of Political Science, Yale University

About the Author:
Heinz Kohler grew up in Berlin, Germany, and later in rural East Germany. Since 1961, he has taught Economics at Amherst College, published numerous textbooks, and logged thousands of flight hours as a commercial pilot. Issues of war and peace and post-traumatic stress are one of his passions. For more information about this book, or to contact the author, please visit www.mynamewasfive.com

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