Military Occupation

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 ...

On March 25, 1957, Italy signed the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC), a forerunner of the European Union (EU) that was promoted as a guarantor of future peace in Europe. For the soldiers on both sides of World War II fighting each other 13 years earlier in the mountains around Monte Cassino, south of Rome, this would have seemed a highly improbable outcome. The Italian Campaign of World War II effectively divided Italians into three groups, and the country into two rival political entities.

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.

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.

lex Wars, un soldado de fortuna que recién ha cumplido su servicio en la Legión Extranjera de Francia, viaja a Nueva York con planes de establecerse y encontrar empleo como agente en el cuerpo policiaco, durante la crisis de los «fat cops». Pero sus planes se vienen abajo cuando es rechazado por el oficial Farías, quien lo conecta con un ex ccompañero de armas a quien no esperaba toparse por estos lares y, a través de éste, conoce a Catherine Jerome. Cat lo contrata para dar caza a una abominación que la prensa ha bautizado como «el monstruo del Metro».