Sonia Meyer fled the Nazis with her parents when she was 2 years old to live in the woods of Germany and Poland with partisans and Gypsies. There her father taught her to throw hand grenades using a wooden darning egg. They lived in the woods, in abandoned houses, in fields, in isolated excursion inns and barns, always dodging the German and later Soviet armies who hunted them relentlessly. Shortly after the war Sonia and her family returned to Cologne Germany where she foraged for food with a band of Gypsy children camped nearby.
Later Sonia was welcomed into a Gypsy encampment in southern France, when she broke the ice by quietly whispering a few words in Romani to horses grazing nearby. She lives in Vermont where she raised horses before retiring to write Dosha.
