Historical Fiction Spotlight: The Road To Liberation

This week's blog features an exciting and dramatic preview of a brand new book: THE ROAD TO LIBERATION. I'd like to give a warm welcome to author, Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger one of several writers who collaborated on this tremendous work. To introduce the book's content is a lovely blurb:

Riveting stories dedicated to celebrating the end of WWII.

From USA Today, international bestselling and award-winning authors comes a collection filled with courage, betrayal, hardships and, ultimately, victory over some of the most oppressive rulers the world has ever encountered.

By 1944, the Axis powers are fiercely holding on to their quickly shrinking territories.
The stakes are high—on both sides: Liberators and oppressors face off in the final battles between good and evil. Only personal bravery and self-sacrifice will tip the scales when the world needs it most.

Read about a small child finding unexpected friends amidst the cruelty of the concentration camps, an Auschwitz survivor working to capture a senior member of the SS, the revolt of a domestic servant hunted by the enemy, a young Jewish girl in a desperate plan to escape the Gestapo, the chaos that confused underground resistance fighters in the Soviet Union, and the difficult lives of a British family made up of displaced children..

2020 marks 75 years since the world celebrated the end of WWII. These books will transport you across countries and continents during the final days, revealing the high price of freedom—and why it is still so necessary to “never forget”.


Writing Magda’s Mark: A Holocaust Story from the POV of a Gentile Heroine
By Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger
 
I was facing a dilemma. I set out to write a story about a woman, a gentile, who performs a bris on a Nazi SS officer’s newborn son in the Sudetenland. How can something like this logistically, religiously, psychologically — any number of -lys — take place, you ask? But it did. This anecdote is the one true event that happens in Magda’s Mark.

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itoměřice—across the river from Theresienstadt—is a real town in the former Sudetenland, with two mining tunnels nearby. These tunnels were fortified in 1944 by some five hundred prisoners brought in from Dachau. The inmates were ordered to prepare the tunnels to house two factories: a tank motor manufactory and an electrical components factory (today Audi and Osram—although Audi did send their tank motors to the Richard I tunnel, Osram never made the relocation to the Bohemian district). More prisoners were brought to the camp to work there.
 
These prisoners were placed in a concentration camp not far away. TB and typhus killed thousands between 1944 and 1945. In the chaos, the Litoměřice concentration camp commander released the prisoners by bringing them to the bridge and releasing them. The majority had only one destination available to them: Theresienstadt. Doctors from Prague rushed to the camp to help and faced one of the worst horrors many had witnessed in the war. Widespread disease and epidemics were killing hundreds of people daily. Crime rates in the district escalated, the squalor contributed to the diseases, and there was utter chaos in a multitude of languages for quite some time.
 
Berlin insisted that the Germans hold Litoměřice. It was the last bridge to the west. As the Germans fled from the Red Tide, they hoped to land in American zones, where they knew they would be treated better, especially the officers. Litoměřice presented their last chance, and it is one theory that some merciful soul—perhaps the concentration camp commander—released the inmates on the bridge before fleeing themselves.
 
All of these factors play on the fringes of Magda’s story. Again, because she was not directly in the camp and could not have been, it was exciting to find ways in which information would filter down to her, the final impacts only known to her at the eve of the war. Instead of feeling as if I were cheating the reader of a Holocaust story, I feel I have enriched it by telling Magda’s version of falling in love with a Jewish family that treated her kindly, that treated her as if she were their own daughter, and blurring the lines that the Nazis so rigorously drew between Jew and gentile. In fact, Magda is defiant of the whole Nazi’s ideologies towards the Jews that she commits the act of circumcision, so that the SS commander’s son “can never fight for Hitler.”
 
We follow Magda’s story throughout the war - her one hope being that at the very least, the Tauber children survive - but in the end, she must confront the person she has become and decide - avenge the Taubers or face the realities of the camp - the reality being, she knows all too well that the Taubers could not have possibly survived three years there.
 
Imagine this: you are the wife of a commanding officer, who is head of a the Moravian (Sudetenland) district. Your reputation has been built upon your selfishness, your unhidden contempt for the local “Slavs” and you are known to wield power with a strong hand; of reporting any slip of a misdeed directly to your husband. Imagine you are pregnant. You need a midwife. You give birth one night, and the midwife goes to clean up the baby. You, in the meantime, are given something to help you rest. When you awake, you find the baby has been returned to you. And he has been circumcised…at a time when Jews are being rounded up and deported to concentration camps…
 
That is what happened to my friend’s mother-in-law. My friend’s husband was that baby boy. And as soon as I heard that story, my jaw dropped to the floor. I needed to know who had been pushed so far and under which circumstances to take that great of a risk. Thus, the first seeds of Magda’s Mark were planted alongside those questions.

After getting permission from my friend, I set out to write it. And I had to imagine backwards how this person got there - how Magda got there, because first came the name. A Magd in German means maid, a servant, which immediately brought to mind Jesus’ Magdalena from the Bible. I was getting closer except that in my first attempt to start the story, I pictured a young woman - almost still a girl, really - hiding the “extra” coupons from the SS officer’s wife in the sleeve of her coat and from the outset, I knew the character was already too strong. Instead, I needed someone a little meeker who then grows into the position I needed - into someone so angry, so righteous, that she would take it out on a young child, only to realise what she had allowed herself to become… I needed that to happen.
 
So I did what I always do: I typed the name into Google and began to search for meaning. I trust my instincts when the name comes up justlikethat. A photo popped up in my photo research. A young woman with a huge birthmark on her face. And there it was. I suddenly knew everything about my character. I understood her immediately. That was the easy part.

The hard part was now teaching a gentile how to go about doing a circumcision. Where would she learn such a procedure? And this as a woman in 1941? Where would she have the nerves, the ability, the tools? Dr Johannes Tauber materialised in my mind. Next question: what would drive Magda to take out “revenge” on an innocent child? In that she was in love with Dr Tauber and, when the Nazis commit their atrocities against the doctor, Magda vows to avenge him?
 
That was too melodramatic for my tastes. Why not turn the love into something more pure? Why not have her love the entire family? The doctor, his wife, their children… and then I saw a fire, and a meek Magda acting heroically for the first time in that she rescues the Tauber’s daughter, whom she loves very much.
 
The rest, as the saying goes, “was history.” My next step was to choose a setting. I needed something bigger than my friend’s husband’s little birth town. I was going to be writing a pretty dramatic story (none of us knew what happened to whomever had circumcised her husband). I needed enough “space” to play things out. I found Litoměřice in Google maps and liked the look of it in the photos.

I still, however had a dilemma, because I could justify Magda’s role as sandek - a role traditional for a man, the one who holds the child in his lap during the circumcision - but how was I going to build in the Holocaust story from a gentile’s point-of-view? When I searched concentration camps in the area, I had no idea that, right across the bridge from Litoměřice, was Theresienstadt, but it is called Terezín in Czech. And suddenly things began to fall into place. I travelled there and the research at Theresienstadt was so rich, I almost regretted having to tell it from Magda’s point-of-view. In fact, I had the extra special challenge of getting her to know anything about what went on behind the walls.
 
So, I created the Underground, and Karol Procháska’s character — a young Jewish man from Prague — whose escape from Theresienstadt was a hodgepodge compilation of stories I from my research on escapees.

It is first important to understand this: Theresienstadt was a centuries-old military base that housed a regiment of Czechoslovakian military personnel in 1938. After the Germans annexed Moravia and Bohemia (the German Sudetenland) in the fall of that year, the Czechoslovakian guards were dissolved and the Wehrmacht took over.
 
The Gestapo set up its prison and headquarters in the Small Fort. Political prisoners and criminals were held there. The Wehrmacht was housed in the various barracks in the town outside of the Small Fort.
 
In the fall of 1941, that Wehrmacht was replaced by male prisoners from German camps, who were then given the task to fortify the barracks and to reconstruct the spaces and the town to accommodate what would later become the Theresienstadt Jewish ghetto. In the spring of 1942, women and children were included in the deportations and sent to Theresienstadt. The crackdown and the initial subjugation of the Jews in the ghetto was harsh and unmerciful. However, when word got out about the treatment of the Jews there, Christians and Jews alike protested across the Third Reich. By the end of summer 1942, the Nazis allowed letters and parcels and eased up on the inmates. They quickly learned to use that to their advantage as a propaganda tool.

In 1942 and in 1944, two films were produced in Theresienstadt for the purposes of propaganda. In 1942 the Nazi administration held a contest for best screenplay. In 1944 the famous film director and Jew, Kurt Gerron, was ordered to produce a film. The Nazis built a swimming pool, renovated the facades, provided food and clothing, a park, and entertainment to make it all look so very…appealing. As one friend said, “It sounds worse than a Stephen King story.” It was.
 
At first the ghetto was used as a transit depot for sending Jews and prisoners from the west on to other camps established in the newly won territories of the Reich, mostly Poland. At the end of the war, as the Nazis became trapped between the Soviet and American fronts, the inmates from camps in both the east and west were transferred to Theresienstadt in a final effort to “save” labor resources. However, many of the railroads were sabotaged by resistance fighters, and many of those prisoners were forced on long death marches before—and if—reaching Theresienstadt.

Litoměřice—across the river from Theresienstadt--is a real town in the former Sudetenland, with two mining tunnels nearby. These tunnels were fortified in 1944 by some five hundred prisoners brought in from Dachau. The inmates were ordered to prepare the tunnels to house two factories: a tank motor manufactory and an electrical components factory (today Audi and Osram—although Audi did send their tank motors to the Richard I tunnel, Osram never made the relocation to the Bohemian district). More prisoners were brought to the camp to work there.
 
These prisoners were placed in a concentration camp not far away. TB and typhus killed thousands between 1944 and 1945. In the chaos, the Litoměřice concentration camp commander released the prisoners by bringing them to the bridge and releasing them. The majority had only one destination available to them: Theresienstadt. Doctors from Prague rushed to the camp to help and faced one of the worst horrors many had witnessed in the war. Widespread disease and epidemics were killing hundreds of people daily. Crime rates in the district escalated, the squalor contributed to the diseases, and there was utter chaos in a multitude of languages for quite some time.
 
Berlin insisted that the Germans hold Litoměřice. It was the last bridge to the west. As the Germans fled from the Red Tide, they hoped to land in American zones, where they knew they would be treated better, especially the officers. Litoměřice presented their last chance, and it is one theory that some merciful soul—perhaps the concentration camp commander—released the inmates on the bridge before fleeing themselves.
 
All of these factors play on the fringes of Magda’s story. Again, because she was not directly in the camp and could not have been, it was exciting to find ways in which information would filter down to her, the final impacts only known to her at the eve of the war. Instead of feeling as if I were cheating the reader of a Holocaust story, I feel I have enriched it by telling Magda’s version of falling in love with a Jewish family that treated her kindly, that treated her as if she were their own daughter, and blurring the lines that the Nazis so rigorously drew between Jew and gentile. In fact, Magda is defiant of the whole Nazi’s ideologies towards the Jews that she commits the act of circumcision, so that the SS commander’s son “can never fight for Hitler.”
 
We follow Magda’s story throughout the war - her one hope being that at the very least, the Tauber children survive - but in the end, she must confront the person she has become and decide - avenge the Taubers or face the realities of the camp - the reality being, she knows all too well that the Taubers could not have possibly survived three years there.

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Buy Links:
 
Amazon US
 
Amazon UK
 
Amazon CA

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Author Bios:
 
Marion Kummerow:
 
Marion Kummerow was born and raised in Germany, before she set out to "discover the world" and lived in various countries. In 1999 she returned to Germany and settled down in Munich where she's now living with her family.
 
After dipping her toes with non-fiction books, she finally tackled the project dear to her heart. UNRELENTING is the story about her grandparents, who belonged to the German resistance and fought against the Nazi regime. It's a book about resilience, love and the courage to stand up and do the right thing.
 
Marina Osipova:
 
Marina Osipova was born in East Germany into a military family and grew up in Russia where she graduated from the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives. She also has a diploma as a German language translator from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages. In Russia, she worked first in a scientific-technical institute as a translator then in a Government Ministry in the office of international relations, later for some Austrian firms. For seventeen years, she lived in the United States where she worked in a law firm. Eventually, she found her home in Austria. She is an award-winning author and a member of the Historical Novel Society.
 
Rachel Wesson:
 
Rachel Wesson is Irish born and bred. Drawn to reading from an early age, she started writing for publication a few years back. When she is not writing, Rachel likes to spend her time reading and playing with her three kids. Living in Dublin there are plenty of things to do, although the cowboys and Indians of her books rarely make an appearance. To chat with Rachel connect with her on Facebook - authorrachelwesson. To check out her newest releases sign up to her mailing list.
 
JJ Toner:
 
My background is in Mathematics and computing, but I have been writing full time since 2005. I write short stories and novels. My novels include the bestselling WW2 spy story 'The Black Orchestra', and its three sequels, 'The Wings of the Eagle', 'A Postcard from Hamburg', and 'The Gingerbread Spy'.
Many of my short stories have been published in mainstream magazines. Check out 'EGGS and Other Stories' - a collection of satirical SF stories. I was born in a cabbage patch in Ireland, and I still live here with my first wife, although a significant part of our extended family lives in Australia.
 
Ellie Midwood:
 
Ellie Midwood is a USA Today bestselling and award-winning historical fiction author. She owes her interest in the history of the Second World War to her grandfather, Junior Sergeant in the 2nd Guards Tank Army of the First Belorussian Front, who began telling her about his experiences on the frontline when she was a young girl. Growing up, her interest in history only deepened and transformed from reading about the war to writing about it. After obtaining her BA in Linguistics, Ellie decided to make writing her full-time career and began working on her first full-length historical novel, "The Girl from Berlin." Ellie is continuously enriching her library with new research material and feeds her passion for WWII and Holocaust history by collecting rare memorabilia and documents.
 
In her free time, Ellie is a health-obsessed yoga enthusiast, neat freak, adventurer, Nazi Germany history expert, polyglot, philosopher, a proud Jew, and a doggie mama. Ellie lives in New York with her fiancé and their Chihuahua named Shark Bait.
 
Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger:
 
Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger was born in Minnesota in 1969 and grew up in the culture-rich neighborhood of "Nordeast" Minneapolis. She started her writing career with short stories, travel narratives, worked as a journalist and then as a managing editor for a magazine publisher before jumping the editor's desk and pursuing her dreams of writing and traveling. In 2000, she moved to western Austria and established her own communications training company. In 2005, she self-published a historical narrative based on her relatives' personal histories and experiences in Ukraine during WWII. She has won several awards for her short stories and now primarily writes historical fiction. During a trip into northern Italy over the Reschen Pass, she stood on the edge of Reschen Lake and desperately wanted to understand how a 15th-century church tower ends up sticking out of the water. What stories were lying beneath? Some eight years later, she launched the "Reschen Valley" series with five books and a novella releasing between 2018 and 2021.
 
For more on Chrystyna, dive in at inktreks(dot)com.
 

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