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Reviewed by Christian Sia for Readers' Favorite
For Better or Worse by Linda Fischer documents the author’s extraordinary odyssey from Nazi-occupied Sudetenland to success in the world of hospitality in the United States. She was born in 1941 to an SS family and survived the collapse of the Third Reich, lived through the brutality of the ethnic cleansing that imprisoned her family in postwar Czechoslovakia. Her earliest troubles include enduring typhoid fever in a refugee camp before becoming a hotelier in Frankfurt, where she met a fellow professional running from the oppression in East Germany. Linda and Horst married in Bermuda in 1963 and set out on a journey of partnership that lasted sixty years. She writes about their challenges when they were penniless, emigrating to the US in 1969. Her husband became the manager of the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, and they also adopted two refugee children from Vietnam.
This memoir spans seven decades and captures with clarity the career triumphs, the family struggles and tragedies, and Linda's diagnosis with aggressive cancer. This memoir stood out in that the author allowed me to peek into what it felt like living in repressive regimes. Her cross-cultural exploration and historical testimony are astounding, and recollections of childhood, like the secret christening attended by Himmler’s wife, Margarete Himmler, her mother’s 46-mile trek in search of her POW father, and the scavenging for coal during the winters after the war, paint a historical portrait of the times in a way that enthralled me. Better or Worse tells a story of love and the evils of history. Linda Fischer inspires with her grit and humanity in a memoir that perfectly bridges American, German, and Vietnamese cultural differences.
