Katherine Flotz

Author of "A Pebble in My Shoe," a memoir

P.O. Box 1124
Crown Point, IN 46308

Tel: (219) 662-2544
Email: kflotz@comcast.net

Two sisters, Katherine and Erna Hoeger, ages nine and three, have suddenly had their lives changed forever. They lost their parents, their home and their freedom. It was 1944 in Gakowa in the former Yugoslavia. They spent three years in a concentration camp, guarded by communist partisans of Marshall Tito. The camp located in their town of Gakowa was one of seven in Yugoslavia where ethnic Germans were incarcerated because they were the "enemy of the state."

The little girls were separated and raised by caring relatives in the camp and later the families escaped in 1947, one going to Austria and the other to Germany. After two more years of separation, Katherine came to America in 1949 and Erna in 1951. They made Chicago their home.

During the same timeline, another young boy, George Flotz, Jr. together with his mother and two brothers left their birthplace of Bezdan, just 15 kilometers from Gakowa and traveled across Europe during the last months of fighting in WWII, dodging bombs and barely surviving as refugees. In search of their father, who was a soldier, they found him in a miraculous turn of events and ended up in Vienna, Austria. They came to Chicago in 1956 where George met Katherine and the rest is history.


*Available in hardcover and soft cover*

*Author welcomes speaking engagements*