Content Warning: “The Terrible Consequences of War” includes descriptions of firebombing.

An Elephant in the Garden is the story of one family’s suffering and survival in Germany during World War II. Lizzie’s memories depict war as a relentless force upending lives, separating families, and leaving death and destruction in its wake. She recounts the day when her father, Papi, came home in his gray army uniform, describing his deployment to France as “the beginning of [the family’s] nightmare, everyone’s nightmare” (28). When Papi stopped coming home on leave and his letters ceased, Lizzie and her family did not know if he was alive or where he might be. Held as a prisoner of war by the Russians, Papi did not return until four years after the war.

The war also separated Lizzie and Peter; when they reached the Allied forces in western Germany, Lizzie, Mutti, and Karli were sent to a refugee camp. She recalls saying goodbye to Peter before being driven away in an army truck: “I clung to him and cried. He whispered in my ear that he would write, that he would come back for me and find me […] I thought my heart would break” (186-87).