It is 1938 in Europe and two vastly different families, separated by a huge religious and cultural chasm await their fates, one with renewed hope, the other with apprehension as World War II and the Holocaust loom ahead. As a nine year old, Marile, a Catholic girl living with her family in Muhldorf, Germany presented Adolf Hitler with a bouquet of flowers, spent eight years in the Hitler Youth and later miraculously survived an Allied bombing attack. Her father, a train engineer transported strings of cattle cars crammed with unlucky Jews to concentration camps. Several of her uncles served in the Wehrmacht, the German Army, their units attacking Poland in 1939 and later Russia in 1941. One of her uncles was a member of the elite First Mountain Division that captured the city of Lvov, Poland twice. Lvov, renamed Lemberg in 1941 by the Germans was, ironically, home to the second family. Simon, a successful Jewish owner of a tailor shop on a main street of Lvov was married with two children. Their lives were forever changed in 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. Shortly after the capture of Lvov, the Germans handed over portions of Poland to the Russians in accordance to a previous agreement and Simon and hundreds of thousands of other Jews found themselves under Soviet rule. While Hitler's henchmen began the systematic oppression of Polish Jews in the so-called General Government part of captured Poland, Lvov remained under Soviet rule until 1941 when Germany attacked Russia. As the Russians evacuated Lvov, they murdered thousands of prisoners in the three prisons in Lvov. Simon was captured by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the notorious Loncki Prison and forced to make SS uniforms. That began his hellish journey through the Third Reich, which would later include time in the Plaszow concentration camp, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and several Dachau camps until finally, near death, being liberated by the Americans. The story unearths hidden connections between the two families and the improbable events that led to a fateful Marile and Simon meeting. The story is complimented by a wealth of photographs, copies of captured Nazi documents and declassified US Army Air Force mission documents.
About the Author: Mr. Ruder spent over thirty-five years working in a corporate environment for companies including General Motors, IBM, ATT, Nissan, EDS and several others before finally achieving a lifelong goal of writing this book. While Mr. Ruder has written articles for diverse magazines about auto drag racing and model railroading, this is his first full-length novel. Rudy attended the Ohio State University and holds a Bachelor Degree from Cleveland State University. His family immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1953 and at the age of five, he began his rapid assimilation into the American culture.