Kildare author’s latest novel takes place in Nazi Germany
The cover of Raphael's latest novel
A SPLIT-second decision determines the lives of one Jewish family in the chaos of Nazi-run Europe – that’s the premise of the latest novel from Kildare author Raphael Ryan.
Set in Germany and eastern Europe during World War II, relives how that decision impacts on the Stern household and three lives.
When the Gestapo arrives to deport the last remaining Jewish family on her street, Edith Stern manages to evade detection and goes on the run when her mother pushes her out the door just as the family is about to be deported into the killing fields of eastern Poland. It’s too dangerous to remain on the streets and on the run, so Edith must rely on the help of kind-hearted Germans and anti-Nazi sympathisers to remain beyond the reach of state security. Relying on the comfort of strangers to protect her from the ever-present danger of being captured, she needs their sympathy to hide in plain sight.
Her fiancé Joseph and his family, the Krombergs, have already been deported to occupied eastern Poland. Their letters to each other are all they’ve got to keep their love alive.
But the harsh regime of those killing grounds gradually takes its toll. Their correspondence begins to dry up as Joseph and his family suffer at the hands of the sadistic local police chief and his ghetto regime that shows no mercy to all who pass through on their way to the death camps further east. In a landscape where memory is precious, this brutal regime threatens total annihilation.
However, the wife of army transport driver, Hans Gerlach, has some sympathy for those Jewish families that have been deported. When she asks her husband to take a package of some relief supplies to the Kromberg family on one of his trips out east, she unwittingly puts his life at risk.
His journey into the eastern territories, made all the more dangerous by the presence of an SS officer on a special mission quite close to the front, must run many risks as he negotiates the harsh landscape of death in eastern Poland.
The fate of the Krombergs, the luck of Edith Stern, and the safe return of Hans Gerlach to the Reich will be determined by factors outside their control.
This is not the first historical work by the Kildare-based author. Ryan has previously written , a historical novel, and , a two-volume history of Newbridge College.
is published by Roseberry Publishing and is available from Amazon (paperback and Kindle) and in local bookshops.
