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| The following manuscripts are available through Barbara
Braun Associates:
Souvenir Souvenir focuses on three ages in a man’s life, showing how the effects of his upbringing, family secrets, and experiences in the Second World War reverberate throughout his life. The first is during the winter of 1945 on the German-Belgian border, immediately after the Battle of the Bulge. Best friends Jake Burnett and Clay Brock struggle for survival along with their squad mates during the brutal winter fighting. The second part takes place in 1964, in Meriden, Connecticut, as Clay is dealing with the potential break-up of his marriage, problems with his son, a threat to his livelihood and the memories of the war which he struggles to keep hidden. At the turning of the century, in the year 2000, Clay in old age finally comes to grips with all the parts of his past. Throughout all these ages, flashbacks to his youth in the 1930s reveal a shattering family secret as traumatic as the life and death decisions faced in winter combat. As Marcel Proust said -
On Desperate Ground Berlin, during the winter of 1945. The end of the Third Reich is near. The city is bombed day and night and the only place safe from the fires and explosions is the Führer Bunker deep underground, where Adolf Hitler waits for a miracle. Above ground, the air is filled with dust and the skies are darkened from smoldering fires. After each air raid, bodies are dug out from collapsed buildings and stacked like cordwood on the curb. Everyone is waiting for the end, uncertain of how it will happen, knowing it must, and hoping it will be soon. Everyone, expect for one man. Colonel Erich Remke, a tall, aristocratic, driven Wehrmacht veteran, who brings Hitler his miracle. Remke has a plan to save the Third Reich and continue the war against the Russians, with the American and British as allies. The plan, code-named Operation Gambit, fantastically simple, captures Hitler’s imagination. As Remke develops Gambit, Hitler's inner circle watch warily, ready to take credit if it succeeds and ignore it if it fails. Unknown to them however, there are dark personal forces within Remke motivating him to continue the war against the Russians, pushing him to the breaking point. As Allied operatives and Remke's own protégé, Dieter Neukirk, race to stop the plan before it can succeed, American and Soviet forces along the Elbe River are ready to fall into Remke's deadly trap. On Desperate Ground is the result of extensive historical research. Except for Operation Gambit, the events are historically accurate, everything from weaponry to the dates of briefings and their participants. A rapid-paced thriller, On Desperate Ground presents a what-if scenario that could have happened, and would have changed the world as we know it. The novel is also an exploration of the difficult moral choices that face soldiers and civilians alike in wartime. During a trip to Germany in 1999 the author visited many of the sites which play important roles in the book. St. Hedwig’s Hospital in Berlin is fictionalized as St. Ludwig’s in On Desperate Ground. During the war, a hospital social worker, Marianne Hapig, played a key role in saving many hidden Jews in Berlin, providing them with medical care and documentation. By saving official identity papers from bombing victims and giving them to Jews, they could live openly and buy food. She was credited with smuggling young Jewish women out of Berlin into the country, disguised as nurse’s aides, when civilian patients had to be moved out of the hospital to make way for wounded soldiers. The bravery of this woman inspired the creation of Elsa Klein, the story’s heroine. |