New York, 1990: One afternoon in November 1990, a repairman fixes an old refrigerator in a New York apartment—a makeshift repair, using two wires twisted together. The resident, an elderly woman with a husky voice, pays him and goes back to reading her newspaper. No one suspects at that moment that this patched-up wire will, a few weeks later, spark a fire that will end her life. This woman’s name is Sophie. What she experienced in the hundred years prior is the true story of this book.
Twelve years earlier, in 1978, a twenty-five-year-old German man enters the Plaza Hotel in New York to meet his great-aunt, about whom he knows little more than that, at eighty-eight, she is sharp-tongued, independent, and apparently fearless. He has no idea that this encounter will become one of the most important of his life. Sophie sizes him up from head to toe. Within minutes, she sees through his self-doubt and the reasons for his flight from Germany—and begins, bit by bit, to tell him her own life story. What she tells him is a story he could never have imagined in his wildest dreams.
Sophie Weiskopf was born in 1890 into a prominent Jewish family with a rabbinical tradition; she grew up in Zurich and, at the age of twenty-nine, lost her first great love to tuberculosis—a banker’s son from Trieste who died shortly before marriage would finally have been possible. Years later, against the fierce opposition of both families, she falls in love with the Catholic innkeeper Josef Schmitz. Together, they transform a run-down large restaurant on the Rhine into one of Cologne’s social hubs—until everything begins to crumble in 1933.
With the rise of the Nazis, Sophie’s life turns into a nightmare. Her own family denounces her. Her property is taken from her, piece by piece, under the guise of laws that declare her a second-class citizen overnight.
In 1941, when even her marriage to a non-Jew no longer protects her, Sophie disappears—and reappears as “Sigrid Sasse,” a woman who officially does not exist, with a memorized biography, blonde hair, and blue eyes as her only shield. She survives Gestapo raids with nerves of steel, nights of bombing in devastated Essen, and the constant fear of being exposed by a single wrong word. And while she fights for her very survival, her own husband secretly divorces her to save himself.