Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin — A Feature Film Package

The Story

An American girl, trapped between two tyrants

Mildred Schindler was born in Great Bend, Kansas in 1929 to German immigrant parents. As a baby she was carried back to Germany so her father could help run the family farm. She grew up under Hitler. Then the Red Army came — and the country she was born in was an ocean and a war away.

Mildred as a young woman pitching hay onto a wagon on the family farm — Mildred on the family farm — from the family archive

Act One / The Farm

A quiet life under a loud regime

A Gentile Lutheran farm family in eastern Germany. Chores, church, harvest, a teenage girl’s ordinary ambitions — all of it lived out under the Third Reich, where the safest thing a family could be was unremarkable.

It is a perspective WWII cinema has rarely taken: not the camps, not the front, not the resistance cell — the farmhouse, where survival meant keeping your head down and your mouth shut, and where the war arrived last and stayed longest.

Duotone red portraits of Hitler and Stalin facing each other — Cover art — Sunbury Press

Act Two / The Capture

February 1945 — one month before her sixteenth birthday

Russian soldiers take the farm. Her father is taken first. Her mother disguises Mildred to keep her off the work-camp lists — a deception that holds until the morning it doesn’t. She is pulled from her mother and brother and pushed into the refugee caravan moving west.

What follows is the spine of the film: a fifteen-year-old girl crossing a shattered continent alone, through checkpoints and boxcars and strangers who are either her salvation or her end, trying to find the people she has left.

Archival photograph of Mildred at a railway station with three men, from the memoir cover — The railway station — from the memoir cover

Act Three / The Document

Proof of a homeland she had never seen

The turn is a piece of paper. A secret, hidden document surfaces — and with it, the possibility of a passage out that no one else in the caravan has: a claim on a country half a world away that she left as an infant and cannot remember.

The third act is a citizenship thriller with a beating heart. It ends where the cover photograph was taken — a railway platform, a smile, and the beginning of a life in Kansas that would run another eighty years.

Why this one

Six reasons this story is different

Producers see a lot of WWII material. Almost none of it comes with this combination of untold angle, finished assets, and a living witness who can still sit for camera.

An American caught on the wrong side

Mildred was a U.S. citizen by birth, raised in Nazi Germany and then held under Soviet occupation. The nationality at the center of the story gives an American audience a way in that no other survivor narrative offers.

The Soviet occupation, not the Reich

The second half of the war in the east — the Red Army’s arrival, the work camps, the refugee columns — remains largely unmade on screen. This is the fresh half of a familiar war.

A perspective rarely filmed

A Gentile Lutheran farm family. Ordinary Germans who were neither perpetrators nor the persecuted the world has already seen — a moral complexity that plays well and has not been mined.

The witness is still here

Mildred is 97, sharp, and still speaking publicly — she traveled in to a 225-person screening in 2026. She is available for interview, consultation, press and premiere. That window will not stay open.

Three audiences, already proven

The book ships in a standard, an education and a faith-based edition. The story already sells into the WWII/history audience, the faith market and the classroom — three distribution lanes, pre-tested.

It is timely, and it is a warning

The memoir’s recurring theme — how quickly a stable country stops being one — is why readers keep pressing it on each other. The film has something to say beyond the period.

1929

Born, Great Bend, Kansas

Feb 1945

Captured by the Red Army

Original documents & photographs

4.4★

Goodreads, 114 ratings

The package

Most of the development risk is already retired

This is not a pitch for a story that still has to be found, researched and cleared. The book is published, the rights sit with the family, the screenplay is written and a documentary short already exists as proof of concept.

Written A completed feature screenplay A full-length feature script has been written from the memoir and is available to read on request.
Published The source memoir, traditionally published Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin: One Woman’s Remarkable Escape from Nazi Germany — Mildred Schindler Janzen with Sherye S. Green. Sunbury Press, November 2020. 294 pages. Foreword by New York Times bestselling author Ken Gire.
Awarded 2020 SUNNY Award winner Recognized by its publisher’s annual awards, with a 4.4-star reader average across 114 Goodreads ratings.
Filmed A 20-minute documentary short Mildred’s Escape: A WW2 Survival Story, directed by Dena Hildebrand. Premiered in Kansas and screened in filmmaker showcases — a ready-made proof of concept and sizzle asset. Screener available.
Archive 95 original documents and photographs A family archive of period photographs, papers and letters already collected, cataloged and reproduced in the book — production design and titles material, in hand.
Living The subject, available Mildred, 97, still speaks publicly and has appeared in museum programs, church and school events and on camera. Family and co-author are engaged and reachable.
Audience A standing readership An active following across the book’s three editions, museum after-hours programming, library and school adoptions, and live audiences of 200-plus.

Mildred Schindler Janzen holding the education and faith-based editions of her memoir — Mildred with the Education and Faith-Based editions

Cover of Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin — Trade

Cover of the Education Edition — Education

Cover of the Faith-Based Edition — Faith-based

Reception

What readers already say

“Utterly inspiring… powerful, emotional impact. The story is one of a kind.”

Reader praise, collected by the author

“Mildred Janzen’s memoir is a must read… Her book entertains, educates, and inspires!”

Stacy Behrends

“I’m so happy I read this book. Her tenacity is contagious.”

Nick — Goodreads

Inge Bursche, 92, reading Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin at home in Germany — Inge Bursche, 92, reading the memoir in Germany

The story is still moving

Eighty years later, the book is still finding people

Inge Bursche, 92, was a neighbor of Mildred’s in Radach. Her daughter found the memoir in an internet search for the village name. The two women are now exchanging letters and comparing what they each remember of the same eighty-year-old winter.

Threads like this one keep surfacing — the kind of living epilogue a film can end on, and a press story that writes itself.

The ask

What we are looking for

The family and authors are seeking a producing partner to take this from a finished screenplay to a financed feature. Rights are held by the family and are available to option.

1 A producer or production company Someone to option the screenplay and shepherd the project — independent, faith-market or historical-drama focused. We are open on structure.
2 Development and financing partners Equity, soft money, tax-credit territories and philanthropic or foundation funding. Kansas and German locations are both natural fits, and the education and remembrance angles open non-traditional funding.
3 An introduction, if that is what you have If you know a producer, financier, agent or distributor who should see this, that is worth as much as a cheque. One warm introduction is the whole ask.
4 Urgency, honestly stated Mildred is 97. Every part of this project is stronger while she can still tell it herself — on set, on camera, and at the premiere.

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Who is behind it

The people attached

Subject & Author

Mildred Schindler Janzen

Born in Great Bend, Kansas in 1929 and raised in Germany, Mildred survived Nazi rule and Soviet occupation before making her way back to the United States. She published her memoir at 91 and, at 97, still speaks to audiences about it.

Co-author

Sherye S. Green

Biographer, brought in by Mildred’s daughter in 2019 to expand her written account. She interviewed Mildred in Kansas that October and completed the manuscript on 11 March 2020 — Mildred’s 91st birthday.

Foreword

Ken Gire

New York Times bestselling author, who wrote the foreword to the memoir.

Documentary Director

Dena Hildebrand

Director of Mildred’s Escape: A WW2 Survival Story, the 20-minute documentary short drawn from the memoir, which premiered in Kansas and continues to screen for live audiences.