Heige Boehm
From ABC BookWorld, "For the first nine years of her life Boehm sometimes imagined that World War II was still raging. Living with her family beside a major thoroughfare in Cologne, Germany she was often awakened at night by the roar of army tanks in her street; her sisters found a hiding place in their basement where they thought a Jewish family had hidden; and a nearby WW II bomb shelter held stories of a boy who died there. When her family visited relatives in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) she saw many bombed-out buildings and bullet holes that hadn't been repaired for decades. When Boehm and her parents immigrated to Canada, she began asking questions about Nazi Germany.
She writes: "My writing is influenced by the stories of my parents who grew up in Nazi Germany and who, at the end of the war, found themselves in East Germany. They escaped with their first two children to West Berlin in 1961, and I was born in Euskirchen West Germany on November 11, 1964. Ten years later my family and I immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where we lived at the Sylvia Hotel for the first few months. I spent nine years researching and writing Secrets in the Shadows.” She has a creative writing certificate from The Writers' Studio of Simon Fraser University and lives on the Sunshine Coast.