Military Occupation

The thrilling true account of Hitler's first defeat. One of Britain's most remarkable victories of the Second World War. In the summer of 1940, the Nazi war machine was at its zenith. France, Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries were all under occupation after a series of lightning military campaigns. Only Britain stood in the way of the complete triumph of Nazi tyranny. But for the first time in the war, Hitler did not prevail.

Through the discovery of a precious friendship album which belonged to 12-year-old Alie, a Jewish schoolgirl in Amsterdam, Claudia Carli has traced and preserved the lives of an entire class of girls, most of whom did not survive the war. Alie and her friends are brought touchingly and vividly to life, along with their writings, in this extraordinary book. Their everyday hopes, pleasures and longings are offset by the constant fear of a knock on the door, a missing friend from class, a family member taken away.

Even in our darkest hour, it must be stated clearly, the Living Goddess did not abandon Her flock. For beneath the alien jackboot, even when very hope itself seemed lost, there arose, by Her Grace, those yet willing to hold high the torch. We were rich. We were poor. We were young. We were old. We sprang from the soil of this planet. We came from far off-world. We were herdeiros. We were minorities. We held advanced degrees. We were illiterate. We’d been born to arms. We had never touched a weapon in our lives. We were as varied as Her Panoply, our paths to Her Truth – as many as the ...

It is difficult, I suppose, for the children of our safe, modern republic to imagine what life had been like in those days, under the Zin occupation. How does one explain the inexplicable? How does one describe the indescribable? How does one get across what it is like to live in a world with no safety, to expect, at any moment, the fatal knock on the door, to know, every waking minute of every waking day, that the very next breath might be one’s last? There are no words for such things. And so, when my grandchildren ask me, I tell them the only thing I can: We lived those days, I tell ...

It is the plain matter-of-fact story of Belgian life under German rule. People might forget that, besides the 150,000 to 200,000 heroes who are now waging war for Belgium on the Western front, there are 7,500,000 heroes who are suffering for Belgium behind the German lines, in the close prison of guarded frontiers, cut off from the whole world, separated alike from those who are fighting for their deliverance and from those who have sought refuge abroad.