Monika Schröder

Monika Schröder grew up in Germany and lived there for the first thirty years of her life. She studied history at the Ruhr University in Bochum and worked at the German parliament before becoming an elementary school teacher. She has taught in international schools in Egypt, Chile, and Oman and is currently the elementary-school librarian at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India. The Dog in the Wood is her first novel.

The Dog in the Wood
Front Street Books, 2009
ages 10 to 14, ISBN 978-1590787014

It is the end of April, 1945, in a small village in eastern Germany. Ten-year-old Fritz loves his vegetable garden. His tomatoes are delicious and he’s attentive to the asparagus, but Grandpa Karl thinks the garden a waste of his grandson’s time. The front is coming closer and the Soviet Army’s invasion of their home can be only a few days away. Grandpa Karl, a Nazi sympathizer, takes Fritz into the forest that surrounds the family farm to show him a secret.

Under a tall pine tree, Grandpa Karl has dug a pit and covered it with branches. The hole is to hide Fritz’s sister, mother, and grandmother when the Russians invade their village. Grandpa Karl is convinced that he and Fritz will defend to the death the Friedrich family.
But when the Russian soldiers arrive, Fritz, his sister, and his mother find themselves alone. They look to Lech, a Polish farmhand, for help, but new communist policies force them off their farm and into the role of refugees. Separated from his home and eventually his family, Fritz has to find his own way in a crumbling world. The Dog in the Wood tells a dramatic story of loss and survival in a changing Germany at the end of World War II.