WE CAME TO HELP

by Monika & Bernhard Diehl Schwinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1976

West Germans Bernhard Diehl and Monika Schwinn were hospital workers for a Catholic aid society in South Vietnam when the Vietcong captured them along with three other nurses in the spring of 1969. Four years and three deaths later, the two survivors were released with the American POWs after the signing of the Paris peace accords. This book is the story of their experiences in a succession of NLF and North Vietnamese prison camps, in the jungle, in the mountains, and near Hanoi. Told in alternating voices, without embellishment or interpretation, it is a grimly moving story of survival, of hope and despair, of small, overwhelming kindnesses and routine, capricious cruelties, and somehow, above all, of bewilderment. The German prisoners knew little of Vietnam before their capture, and four years later they had acquired hardly more than a reluctant admiration for the organization of guerrilla warfare and a deep mistrust of their captors. They never understood why they had been captured--""we only came to this country to help""--and faith proved no assistance, though treacherous hope was second only to the daily rice ration in keeping them alive. They watched their three friends die of malaria, malnutrition, and medical negligence in the first few months of captivity; Monika nearly died, but Bernhard managed to reawaken her will to live. These two very different temperaments--Monika resistant, imaginative, despairing, Bernhard hooked on hope and willing to do anything to survive--went on through four more years of hunger, cold, illness, interrogation, solitary confinement, and surreptitious communication with their American fellow-prisoners. Their valuably detailed book is a historical document, but it is also an immediate, indelible experience and a moral conundrum.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: NONFICTION