Hello and welcome to this weeks Tuesday Teaser. The place where we take a sneaky peek at the beginning of a book.
This weeks book is The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers and is translated from German by Margot Bettauer Dembo. This weeks book is a little different but it looks like a fascinating book to read.
Written in 1939 and first published in 1942 in Germany where it became a national bestseller in 1943. The Seventh Cross presented a still doubtful, naive America - a first-hand account of life in Hitler's Germany and of the horrors of the concentration camps.
Anna Seghers was born Anna Reiling during 1900. As a writer she was notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City (1941–47).
She returned to Europe after the war, living in West Berlin (1947–50), which was occupied by Allied forces. She eventually settled in the German Democratic Republic, where she worked on cultural and peace issues. She received numerous awards and in 1967 was nominated for the Nobel Prize by the GDR. She died in 1983 and was buried in Berlin.
The Blurb
Seven prisoners escape from Westhofen concentration camp. Seven crosses are erected in the grounds and the commandant vows to capture the fugitives within a week. Six men are caught quickly, but George Heisler slips through his pursuers' fingers and it becomes a matter of pride to track him down, at whatever cost.
Who can George trust? Who will betray him? The years of fear have changed those he knew best: his brother is now an SS officer; his lover turns him away. Hunted, injured and desperate, time is running out for George, and whoever is caught aiding his escape will pay with their life.
The Seventh Cross powerfully documents the insidious rise of a fascist regime - the seething paranoia, the sudden arrests, the silence and fear.
Chapter 1
Probably no trees ever cut down in our country were as unique, as strange as the seven plane trees growing at the gable end of Barracks III. Their crowns, for a reason to be revealed at a later time, had previously been cut off and a board had been nailed across each of the tree trunks at shoulder height. From afar, the seven plane trees looked like seven crosses.
When the new camp commandant arrived - his name was Sommerfeld - he immediately had them all cut up into kindling. He was quite different from his predecessor, Fahrenberg, the old warrior, "conqueror of Seeligenstadt," where his father still has a plumbing business on the market square today. The new camp commandant had served in Africa as a colonial officer before the war, and after the war he had marched on red Hamburg with his old major, Lettow-Vorbeck. We found out about all this only much later. While the first commandant had been a fool responsible for terrible, unpredictable acts of cruelty, this new one was a sober, calculating man whose actions were predictable.
Fahrenberg would have been quite capable of having us all beaten. Sommerfeld, on the other hand, was just as likely to line us up and then have every fourth one pulled out and beaten to death. Back then we didn't know this. And even if we had known, what difference would it have made in the face of the emotions that overwhelmed us when we saw the six trees being cut down and then the seventh one as well! A small triumph certainly, measured against our general helplessness, our prison clothing. And yet it was nevertheless a triumph to suddenly feel our own power after who knew how long...
ISBN: 9780349010410
Publisher: Virago
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Has this extract whet your appetite?
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