Readers Roost: European history

Showing posts with label European history. Show all posts

Monday, April 15, 2024

The Sower of the Black Field Book Blitz #rabtbooktours

Inspired by the True Story of an American in Nazi Germany

Historical Fiction

Date Published: April 15, 2024

INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS

Throughout the Third Reich, millions of Germans pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler. In the Bavarian village of Schwarzenfeld, they followed an American citizen.

As he struggles to rekindle the faith of a guilt-ridden Wehrmacht veteran, a morose widow, and her grieving teenage son, Fr. Viktor Koch, C.P. is haunted by self-doubt. What is driving him to stay in the Third Reich? Is he following a higher plan, or the mystic compulsion of his German heritage? Exposed to American ideals, his parishioners grow restless under Nazi rule. Relying upon his ingenuity to keep them out of prison, Fr. Viktor solicits aid from an unlikely intercessor—the Nazi charity worker who confiscated his monastery for state purposes.

In April 1945, American liberators make a gruesome discovery: the SS have left a mass grave of concentration camp victims on Schwarzenfeld’s borders. Enraged by the sight, the infantry commander orders the townspeople to disinter 140 corpses, construct coffins despite material shortages, dig a grave trench, and hold a funeral ceremony—all in 24 hours. If they fail to fulfill this ultimatum, he vows to execute all German men in town.

Fr. Viktor has to pull off a miracle: he must convince his countrymen that his followers are not the enemy. Their humanity is intact. And most of all, they are innocent.

About the Author

Katherine Koch is a renaissance woman from San Antonio, Texas. By day she is a professional web administrator, digital marketing specialist, and graphic designer. By night she is an independent scholar, historian, and writer. She is captivated by stories of the Passionist missionaries in her family, all of whom have a peculiar knack for tumbling into harm’s way during history’s most fascinating time periods.

Contact Links

Twitter/X: @KKochWriter

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Those Absent Guest Post

Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain

by Jill Culiner

In 1999, I was in Budapest, preparing a photographic exhibition about the vanished Jews of Eastern Europe, when I heard about the Kunmadaras pogrom: In May 1946, Holocaust survivors were accused of kidnapping Christian children and using their blood for kosher sausage. Grabbing iron bars, garden tools, any weapon they could find, the town's residents went on a rampage, murdering Jews and pillaging their homes and businesses

How could such an absurd accusation have been levelled after the war? I was determined to discover the answer.

When I arrived in Kunmadaras, I was accepted by a group of friendly locals who hung around the local watering hole run by blowsy Ildikó — Tarzan, the black marketer and corrupt night watchman, Udo, the Austrian who preferred Hungarian women to his wife, Kata, the eternal party girl, hard-drinking Karcsi, and the brutal Ibolya. And although no one seemed to resent my questioning, all denied having any knowledge of the pogrom.

Settling in the neighbouring village of Tiszaörs, I soon discovered that village society was a unique but uneasy mix of former communists, dispossessed nobles, expropriated peasants, German retirees, black marketers, former members of the Hitler Youth Movement, and Hungarians who had returned after communism ended.

I began looking for traces of the vanished local Jewish community. And I discovered that, although Jews had lived here for hundreds of years and had arrived in the country alongside the Magyar tribes in the 9^th century, the villagers denied their existence. Therefore, I became more determined to question, listen, observe, to ferret out the truth about the pogrom and the Jews who were so strikingly absent.

Living on the Hungarian Great Plain was a remarkable experience, and carrying out an investigation, much as an amateur detective would, allowed me to step into the country’s history. Therefore, Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain is a blend of history, traditions, local happenings, rumour, love stories, and prejudices. And I hope I have portrayed, with empathy, people who, often caught in political conflicts, are pawns in a global one.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xa1aiVkiT4

Purchase links: https://books2read.com/GreatPlain

Chapters on SoundCloud

https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner/those-absent-on-the-great-hungarian-plain-the-hungarian-count

https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner/2-those-absent-on-the-great-hungarian-plain-tarzan-udo-and-the-russians/sets

Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain

A Hungarian village on the Great Plain: a microcosm reflecting this country’s history from early tribal invasion, to Soviet subordination, to European Community membership. Here, peasants, herders, party girls, former nazis and lapsed communists share gossip as well as love stories; and unscrupulous leaders, totalitarian or freely elected, decide behaviour. And while fully embracing the new consumer society, there remains one constant: hatred of the long-vanished rural Jew.

Author Bio

Born in New York, raised in Toronto, Jill Culiner, writer, social critical artist, and photographer has spent most of her life in France, England, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Holland, and North Africa. Her photographic exhibition about the First and Second World Wars, La Mémoire Effacée, toured France, Canada, and Hungary under the auspices of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO. Her non-fiction, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers won the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History and was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Award. Her biography of a nineteenth-century rebel Yiddish poet and singer, A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, was published by Claret Press in 2022.