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1942: Two women, one heartbreaking story bound by Auschwitz
1942: Two women, one heartbreaking story bound by Auschwitz
It is 1942 and Eva Adami has boarded a train to Auschwitz. Barely able to breathe due to the press of bodies and exhausted from standing up for two days, she can think only of her longed-for reunion with her husband Michal, who was sent there six months earlier.
But when Eva arrives at Auschwitz, there is no sign of Michal and the stark reality of the camp comes crashing down upon her. As she lies heartbroken and shivering on a thin mattress, her head shaved by rough hands, she hears a whisper. Her bunkmate, Sofie, is reaching out her hand…
As the days pass, the two women learn each other’s hopes and dreams – Eva’s is that she will find Michal alive in this terrible place, and Sofie’s is that she will be reunited with her son Tomas, over the border in an orphanage in Austria. Sofie sees the chance to engineer one last meeting between Eva and Michal and knows she must take it even if means befriending the enemy…
But when Eva realises she is pregnant she fears she has endangered both their lives. The women promise to protect each other’s children, should the worst occur. For they are determined to hold on to the last flower of hope in the shadows and degradation: their precious children, who they pray will live to tell their story when they no longer can.
The Auschwitz concentration camp was actually a series of forty camps and settlement block which was actually a former army barracks. After Germany invaded Poland, which started WW2, the Germans converted Auschwitz to hold Polish political prisoners.
The first Jews were murdered in block 11 of Auschwitz I in September 1941 and went on to become a major site of the Nazis’ Final Solution to the Jewish Question. As tis story painfully illustrates, between 1942 and 1944, trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to the camp’s gas chambers. Approximately 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz. More than 1.1 million died and the majority of them were Jews.This novel captures the awful conditions at the camp, the everyday reality of life there, the fear, constant struggle, the knowledge of what is happening to others and trying to find your loved ones.
Destination: Auschwitz Author/Guide: Lily Graham Departure Time:1942
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