Burying the Ghosts: She escaped Nazi Germany only to have her life torn apart by the woman she saved from the camps: her mother by Sonia Case

Author:Sonia Case [Case, Sonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789493322127
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Published: 2023-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

19

DIFFICULT DECISIONS

SUMMER 1943

The war dragged on and on. By summer 1943, 18 months after that eventful Christmas, Germany was beginning to lose its fight with the Soviets, but not before an entire village of civilians from Belarus were burnt alive. The Allied Forces had defeated the Italians and Germans in desert battles, and Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, had declared a “Total War.” Back at home, fights broke out between Black American soldiers and British police in the North of England, and Aberdeen was badly bombed.

Viktor had been released from his Isle of Man internment camp and was back in a South London operating theater, cutting open chests, revealing engorged hearts and faulty vessels. With minute strokes and incisions, he restored his patients’ chance of life. Several steps on from their exchange of letters, he and Betty met whenever possible and made love when time and space allowed. She had fallen for this talented dark Jew with his strange Viennese accent and bleak outlook.

Rudolf Hess breathed in the good Welsh air of Abergavenny, where he enjoyed the relative luxury of his own hospital room. Despite the many psychiatrists sent to study his every thought and deed, no conclusions were drawn, and following his amateur attempt to kill himself by jumping from his prison balcony, it was decided that a mental facility would best meet his needs.

In North London, Peter sat with yet another battle-scarred officer, listening to the soldier’s recollections of mutilated bodies and severed limbs. He sometimes wondered whether the act of retelling worsened the nightmares these men suffered each night. Trauma. There was no cure.

Meanwhile, the average man and woman continued to display their usual stoicism, stepping over mounds of broken buildings to deliver milk, avoiding giant potholes in the road to sit in stuffy offices or stand in suffocating factories producing ever more armaments and munitions, while mourning their dead and dying. And others, enjoying the freedoms granted by a police force whose eyes were focused on the war effort, indulged in a little black-market profiteering: cigarettes, meat, alcohol and of course – ladies’ stockings.

And now, look up. If the factory roof were removed, Hedda and Alice, Valerie and Raymond, Mr. Krivitsky and all the other girls would see a glorious blue English sky, streaked with just the faintest of cirrus clouds. Over in North Africa, they would watch parachutes float gently down against an azure backdrop, their descent controlled by light-as-a-feather steering lines, thermals occasionally wafting them sideways and upwards before the softest of landings on the yellow sands of Tunis. They would slap each other on the back and say: “We sewed those silks. We secured those seams.”

Also attached securely to the factory floor of KV Clothing were the heavy sewing machines that turned and whirred ever faster to keep up with the endless orders. 70 new workers had been brought in to meet demand. Production was devoted exclusively to the manufacture of canopies, ropes, cords, and netting to keep out the mosquitoes in

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