Translating Spirituality and Medicine in the Healing Professions: A Physician-Clergy Handbook

This first-person narrative tells the true story of Marguerite Kirchner, whose multicultural family was living in Germany when WWII began. We have remained as true as possible to Marguerite's account which reveals to readers the cruelty of war and the innocence of past generations. As a child, her family lived a luxurious life. Her mother was a French aristocrat, and her father a wealthy Austrian diplomat, and so her story begins. Always defiant, Margie was forced into a labor camp for dissident teenagers. She attended the University of Berlin during the Berlin bombings, became a young teacher in the Polish war zone, was captured as a prisoner of war and escaped, and after the war, worked for the Allied Forces, helping repatriate those who had been displaced. Her story demonstrates cunning and great courage. She went from affluence to poverty and survived the war on her wits alone, dependent on only herself and the skills she'd acquired from traveling with her family. Only after the war does she reflect on what her single-minded struggle for survival cost her, and a new journey, of a very different kind, begins.