Lois has been an active storyteller for the last fifteen years. Gerti’s War is her first non-fiction novel and the reason she started writing. Lois’ life changed when she was visiting Gerti and extended family in Germany and a photo album fell out and onto her foot. That photograph showed Gerti’s father wearing a WWII German uniform with another German officer in a wagon. Lois casually asked her cousin, “What did you do in the war?” However, she was not prepared for Gerti’s answer. Gerti told Lois that she had been in the Hitler Youth and was fourteen when the war started. Lois literally dropped to her knees. The kindest woman she had ever known, couldn’t be a “Nazi”? Gerti’s War covers the years 1938-47 showing what life was like in Germany during the war and afterwards as taken from Gerti’s journals from the time and the stories she told.