The project is based on the diary of the author's grandparents, which chronicles forty years of tumultuous personal and political history.  She only found the diary two years ago in her brother’s basement in Berlin. 

It begins in Manchuria where Cornelia Feye's grandparents met in 1928, followed by their escape after the Mukden Incident in 1931 and the Japanese occupation, their dramatic journey on the Transsibirian railroad from Harbin to Moscow and Berlin, the years of unemployment during the Weimar Republic, the rise of the National Socialists, and WWII, her grandfather’s four years as POW in Siberia and finally the reconstruction and economic prosperity in post-war Germany. The diary movingly tells the great love story between two very different people – her grandfather Kornelius, a Swabian former’s son, and grandmother Frida, a twelve-year-older cultured Swiss milliner, that fate brought together for unknown reasons in Mukden. 

Beside the trans-generational and historical components of this project, it also touches on deeper philosophical themes such as destiny versus free will, and the role of faith in surviving insurmountable obstacles. It offers opportunities for deep-dive research into the Japanese Occupation of Manchuria, the History of the Trans Siberian Railroad in Stalinist Russia, The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln as Archetype, and Russian POW Camps in Siberia, which should be of general interest (see bibliography). Quotes from the diary are used as points of departure and to preserve the eloquent and poetic language. Select incidents will be set in-scene as historical fiction to communicate the emotional impact of this dramatic and traumatic story.