Erika Summ was born in the 1920s in the Hohenlohe region in the northeast of present-day Baden-Württemberg. Initially growing up in Stachenhausen and later in Steinach, she was the daughter of a shepherd, became a parish cook, and later a front-line nurse – an unusual path at that time. At the end of her career, she worked as an operating room nurse, a role that requires a lot of empathy, vigilance, and knowledge. She recounts her childhood and youth in detail, accompanied by informative photos that her parents had taken by a professional photographer year after year. However, the rural idyll depicted in these photos is somewhat deceptive. Hard work and the realities of life and death were closely intertwined in the countryside. And in the early 1930s, politics, with the rise of National Socialism, also intruded into rural life in Germany.