SOLDIER X

'''Soldier X''' is a Children's fiction book written by Don Wulffson about a German boy named Eric Brandt, who is unwillingly recruited into the Jugend, or Hitler's children's army, during World War II. Not all Germans were Nazis and Brandt does not share the Nazist perspective. The book tells about the war from different perspective of the Nazis and the Russians, as well as the ways in which war can affect a person.Soldier X

Contents

Plot

Nationality Inaccuracies

Plot

Soldier X
A German boy named Eric Brandt is on a train going to the Eastern Front to fight the advancing Russians advancing into Germany he meets a boy named Jacob and becomes friends with him, he then gets off the train and meet their sergeant whose name is Doblemann, his face is badly scarred (later revealed because a grenade blew up in his face). Eric makes another friend named Oscar after meeting Doblemann. The train and is then attacked by the Russian air-force, and a rosy-cheeked boy on their train is killed. After the attack he sees a kid waiting to be treated and has a shrapnel stuck in his forehead. Eric goes to talk to him, Eric finds out his name is Hals, and takes the shrapnel out of his forehead. Eric then goes to battle and gets wounded during which he becomes trapped behind the Russian lines.So he trades uniforms with a dead Russian soldier so that when he is found by a group of Russian soldiers they won't kill him for being German. He is the brought to a hospital, and meets Tamara Imanov. He was not recognized as a German, even though he had blond hair and blue eyes, but Eric spoke fluent Russian due to his Russian ancestry. From the beginning, he liked Tamara, as did many of the others in the hospital. After Eric recovered, Tamara discovered he was a German when Eric cursed in German when he spilled a pot of hot water on himself. She did not turn him in, but she stopped talking to him. When the hospital was attacked by Germans, Eric and Tamara ran away with four of the wounded soldiers, three of them got killed, and the fourth one was shot but managed to escape. The two wander until they found a house in a small village in Czechoslovakia, that was recently used to house German soldiers that left for the front. They were taken in and cared for. But the house was under fire and they had to leave again, but the lady who had taken them in had refused to leave.
They traveled with a large group of people who were fleeing as well. They had little to eat and drink for many days. Then they came across a small deserted town where they were shot by Americans.
When Erik woke up, he was in another hospital, and to his disbelief, his left arm was missing, and his face was severely damaged. He learned to live with his now partially healed face, he gradually came to accept how he was and ended up marrying Tamara. He became a schoolteacher in Seattle, Washington, but never told his students anything other than that he fought in World War Two.

Nationality Inaccuracies

In the story, Eric's grandparents were described as Russians but the grandparents were from the Odessa region which would have made them Ukrainians. Furthermore if Eric's grandparents had been Ukrainian, then the language that Eric learned would not be Russian but Ukrainian which is very similar but noticeably different. This would make the guessing of Eric's sub nationality by the soldiers a simpler matter then it was claimed to be. Tamara was also Ukrainian because not long after they escaped the destruction of Tamara's hometown in which the hospital was contained, a farmer told them that they were in the Ukraine.