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We publish great books and graphic novels.
Our newest book is the novel Shadow of War, based on the Journal of Daniel Kippelstein and written by James Slocum.
Check out our youtube video! Click on this link (or copy and paste it into your browser.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO_jJdmkAbc
Hardcover with dust jacket 259 pages
Cover Art by Andrew Behr
Attention Book Clubs, Professors, teachers, and librarians: We offer a free study guide for leading discussions of the book.
As a sample, here's the beginning of the book:
Chapter One The End of Time
I
Our newest book is the novel Shadow of War, based on the Journal of Daniel Kippelstein and written by James Slocum.
Check out our youtube video! Click on this link (or copy and paste it into your browser.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Hardcover with dust jacket 259 pages
Cover Art by Andrew Behr
Attention Book Clubs, Professors, teachers, and librarians: We offer a free study guide for leading discussions of the book.
As a sample, here's the beginning of the book:
Chapter One The End of Time
April brought cold winds and a fine sleet to the gray cobblestone streets of Prague. Stray drops fell from rooftops and overhangs. Black puddles gathered in gutters and dotted the roadway and sidewalk. A biting gust stabbed through all but the heaviest wool. It was winter's final gasp, and thankfully so. The winter of 1939 had been one Czechoslovakia and all the world would not soon forget.
While the days were growing noticeably longer and spring was waiting just offstage, the sun had set at least a half hour before Solomon Kippelstein usually quit work, at 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, and walked the hundred steps to his home next door. Solomon Kipplestein was dark-haired and slender and moved with an absentminded grace. His short sideburns revealed the slightest flecks of gray, and unlike more Orthodox men, he was clean-shaven. His left eyelid drooped just slightly, sometimes giving the impression he was calm and perhaps a little slow mentally, which was not the case. He ran the Kippelstein Watch Works, a business established by his great-grandfather and passed along through generations to him. April was a comparatively quiet time of year for the business. Eighteen- and twenty-hour days were common for him in August, September, and October when Christmas inventories were being built and shipped. About 45 percent of the company's sales were made at Christmas, the rest spread throughout the year.
A Kippelstein watch was arguably one of the finest and most reliable east of Switzerland. It was nothing for a fifty-year-old Kippelstein watch to be brought back to the factory for a new crystal face, which had broken due to some odd accident, while the watch itself, if wound properly, had never missed a single second. In fifty years! Solomon's pride in the company and its products was fierce beyond words and exceeded only by his pride in his family.
The Kippelstein home and the Watch Works were located on the fringes of the Old Town section of Prague. Here, the streets were narrow, leading to many a tiny courtyard with narrower alleys between ancient, frescoed tenements. The rooftops were a rust-colored brown and steeply angled to prevent winter snows from piling up too high. Some of the buildings dated back to the ninth century. The factory was in a twelfth-century edifice that had been modernized considerably. Their home was of more recent vintage, rebuilt after a mid-nineteenth-century fire destroyed a previous structure.
Esta Kippelstein sat with her nine-year-old son Jacob in the kitchen, enjoying a milk and kolachy break. Esta had pale white skin and jet-black hair the consistency of steel wool. Her nervous energy could, at times, put others on edge. But her smile was disarming and her gray eyes often shined with mischief when they weren't furrowed with worry. Despite having borne three children, she barely tipped the scales past 110 pounds. Nearby, Vlasta, the Kippelstein's cook and housekeeper, peeled potatoes for their dinner. Esta calmly corrected Jacob's hurried stuffing of kolachys down his throat as if he were a starving bird.
"Please, Jacob. One at a time and slowly, or you'll choke to death."
His love of kolachys, as well as most food, made Jacob slightly pudgy in build. His dark, wiry hair repelled all combs. His eyeglasses were constantly slipping down his nose and just as constantly he pushed them back in front of his eyes. Vlasta, a big-boned peasant girl of great strength and joyous laughter, was famous in the neighborhood for her culinary skills and kolachys, a round, doughy pastry filled with poppy seed or apricot or prune preserves, were one of her specialties.
It was a little after six when Esta noticed that fifteen-year-old Anna was late returning from her piano lesson. Her other son, fourteen-year-old Daniel, was a full-time student at St. Jude's, a boys' school on the southeast side of Prague. Esta went to the living room window, which faced the street, and nervously spied out. No Anna. She unconsciously twirled her hair into tight locks like unraveled watch springs. Before the Nazi invasion just a month ago, Esta would not have given Anna's absence a second thought. But now with Prague under martial law, German soldiers were everywhere, and the tension was palpable.
This tension was of little concern to Anna right then. As the dark, heavy clouds of the day began to slowly breakup, Anna detoured through the Old Town Square and down the main shopping avenues. Anna had long, light brown hair and blue eyes with the warm luster of pearls, belying a playful side to her serious demeanor. She had a fine linear nose and a smile that, when she chose to exhibit it, could brighten a room. She wore a dark gray wool skirt that flowed to mid-calf and a white blouse that buttoned down the back and had lace around the collar. Her stylish but rather thin navy blue jacket was often unsuccessful at keeping the wind and cold out. She didn't care. She sensed spring was near, and it elated her.
So Anna dilly-dallied, looking at the luminous treasures beckoning from the store windows. One displayed elegant women's clothing; one jewelry and fine crystal; another men's shoes and belts; still another, kitchenware. This evening she lingered outside Melnik's, a small store that sold children's clothing and toys. Her attention was caught by an intricately fashioned dollhouse, its back open to the street, fully decorated with tiny furnishings and tiny people.
Most captivating of all, the dollhouse contained a miniature modern bathroom, complete with shower. Daniel had told her all about the group showers at St. Jude's, and despite his disdain for them, she yearned to try a shower bath. Naturally St. Jude's facilities lacked the privacy of this luxurious dollhouse's creation, which Anna thought must be like bathing in a warm summer rain.
Anna was a dreamer. For her, a dollhouse behind the dusty window of Melnik's became more than a plaything. She placed herself inside it, in her mind's eye, applying deep red lipstick at the Art Deco dressing table, wearing a white silk and marabou trimmed robe, pinching her lips, just like the movie star Jean Harlow, preparing for a date.
Books could also whisk Anna off into whatever world had been created on the page before her. She liked to imagine herself in the story and unselfconsciously created elaborate additions to the works featuring herself as heroine. She read everything she could get her hands on, sometimes neglecting math problems and biology assignments in favor of fiction. That evening, along with her piano music, she clasped two books: a collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories and a copy of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. She had been instantly smitten with Huck and the mighty Mississippi. The boy, about her age, with his beguiling innocence and honesty and the verdant open spaces of mid-nineteenth century Missouri, all seemed so different from the cold gray armed camp that Prague had become. As a result, lately her mind wasn't in her hometown, harassed by Nazis and curfews, but transplanted to America, where she'd go calmly rafting down the majestic Mississippi River. She could almost smell the massed wood violets at the great river's shore, hear the suck of the pole as it pulled free from the muddy bottom, feel the bump of the channel catfish nosing about the raft.
A German soldier on a motorcycle sped loudly past Melnik's. Reluctantly Anna shook off her reverie and left the shop window. She realized they might be worried about her at home. She knew the occupation had change things irrevocably. She began to head back.
Esta and Solomon had witnessed from afar the Germans invasion of neighboring Austria in March the year before and saw the viciousness with which the Nazis dealt with Jews, Communists, and anyone else they decided they didn't like. They had heard about Mauthausen, the first concentration camp outside of Germany, constructed near Linz, and rumors flew about the frightening number of executions and general deplorable conditions (prisoners forced to mine with no tools, just bare hands). But they were just rumors; things couldn't be that bad, could they? There was no denying that after the Anschluss in Austria, Czechoslovakia was now surrounded on three sides by the Third Reich. Austrian Jews were being forced to hand over their wealth and property to the Reich in exchange for permits to leave Austria. Those Jews without wealth were being shipped to Mauthausen.
Many Jews in Prague, aware of what was happening, had fled their homeland that summer. On the other hand, the Kippelsteins, along with many others, felt that Austria was the end of the line in the Nazis' plans for expansion (the Austrian population was mostly German, after all), that the Germans wanted nothing to do with Czechoslovakia and besides, the other European nations wold never stand for another German invasion. But in late September Hitler set his sights on the Sudetenland, a small region in northern Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany and had been cut away from the the Fatherland after World War I as part of the armistice.
On September 30, 1938, under threat of German invasion, Great Britain and France agreed to let Hitler take over the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia and allowed the Germans first to dissolve the elected government in Prague and then to install Supreme Court Justice Dr. Emil Hacha, who was sixty-five years old and in the early stages of senility, at the head of a puppet government. To Solomon and Esta's complete astonishment, all the major European powers, including Great Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, subscribed to Hitler's claims that the Sudetenland was really part of Germany and Czechoslovakia was still under Czech control. The United States stood by quietly and proclaimed its neutrality. With Hacha's foggy mental condition, Czechoslovakia was on the verge of chaos within six months. On March 15, 1939, Hacha went to Berlin and Hitler made him sign a declaration allowing the German Army to overrun the remainder of the country "to protect" Czechoslovakia.
The Kippelsteins, as well as nearly all of their countrymen, awaited the world's outrage and prompt military response to the invasion. But none came. Unarmed and with no army of their own, the Czechs could only watch as the German SS was sent in to terrorize politicians and intellectuals, take over the press, and dehumanize Jews. New rules appeared. No Jews on trolleys. No Jews in theaters. No Jews allowed on the streets from 8 P.M. until 6 A.M. Jews could shop only from noon to 4 P.M. Solomon and Esta had read in the Czech newspapers with deep concern about the Krystalnacht that had occurred in Germany just five months before, where Jews' property was seized or destroyed and the Germans rescinded any remaining civil rights the Jews hadn't already lost since the Nazis came to power in 1933. Now the Nazis were completely in charge in Czechoslovakia, an with their control of the Czech press, there was little or no coverage of the Germans' murderous campaign of terror.
Solomon immediately began to plan his family's escape. It took a week for the Czech borders to reopen slightly for the purposes of commerce. He sent Anton, his most trusted employee, to Zurich on the pretext of picking up watch screws and other parts. There Anton opened up an account in the company's name at the Union Bank of Switzerland with a wad of cash (just over $1000 worth) sewn into the lining of his leather satchel. Solomon raised further cash by closing one back account (before it was frozen and confiscated) and pawning a gold necklace, some hand-painted Venetian glassware with gold leaf he and Esta had received as a wedding present, and two sterling silver candelabras. The items only brought a third of what they would have prior to the invasion, but it was money. In the next two weeks at the first opportunity, the Kippelsteins would escape south to Hungary, their eventual goal being Switzerland. Not a word was mentioned to the children.
At 6:15 that evening, about the time Anna tore herself away from Melnik's store window, the Kippelsteins' back door flew open, and Solomon ran in, panting heavily, with no hat, his shirt partly untucked, his black wool coat unbuttoned and flowing like a cape. He slammed the door shut behind him. Esta jumped up, knowing something was amiss because Solomon never came in the back door and rarely came home even a few minutes early.
"Sol! What has happened?!" she cried anxiously.
"Hurry. There's no time. Where is Anna?"
"Anna's at her piano lesson but she'll be back soon. Solomon, tell me, what's wrong?!"
Catching his breath, he supported himself against the staircase newel post. "The Germans. They're at the factory, looking for me. I ran out the back. They'll be here anytime now. Hurry! Put all your jewelry in a valise. We can use it to buy passage. We must run now. We'll fetch Daniel from school and then make for the border."
But it was too late. Heavy footsteps stomped on the walk and up to the front door. A booted foot kicked it open.
Esta and Solomon watched in disbelief and horror as the hated storm troopers entered their home. Solomon pushed his wife back into the kitchen and then stepped forward to confront the Nazis.
An SS colonel in jet-black uniform stepped through the broken door and five soldiers dressed in mouse gray followed. Their breeches bagged at the thighs and their black boots rose to the knees. Each man wore a scarlet band with a black and white swastika on the left arm. The colonel had a Ritterkruez, or Knight's Cross, at his neck and a First Class Iron Cross on his Totenkopf, or death's head, worn only by the SS, and above that a sliver German eagle with spread wings held a swastika in a wreath. His left collar had a black rectangle with three silver diamonds; his right collar tow SS lightning bolts. He word a black leather belt with cross strap and side-arm holster. Two soldiers carried 9mm MP-40 submachine guns.
"You broke our door. Why didn't you just knock?" Solomon asked, his voice quavering more from anger than fear.
The tall SS colonel dismissed the words as if they had never been uttered.
"You are Solomon Kippelstein?" asked the colonel.
"Yes. What do you want?" Solomon again was ignored.
"Take him outside," the officer commanded. Two of his men took Solomon by the arms and dragged him out the door.
"Find the rest of them," the colonel barked to the other three troops.
In the kitchen Esta frantically pulled Jacob to his feet, as he stuffed one last kolachy into his mouth. "Quick, upstairs!" she said under her breath.
"Why?!" he cried.
"Hurry!" she countered with quiet determination.
They ran up the back stairs.
Vlasta watched dumbfounded. She had heard the whispered stories. Now they were here for the Kippelsteins. Still holding a wooden spoon caked with kolachy dough, she stood frozen with fear.
The men marched into her kitchen, and glancing at the half-empty glasses of milk on the table, their leader demanded, "Where are they?"
"Who?" she retorted, feigning ignorance.
"The wife, the children, you stupid Slovak! Where are they?!"
"Gone," Vlasta answered.
"Search upstairs," he commanded a private.
Anna turned the corner to her street, but stopped in her tracks as if her feet were suddenly encased in cement. A German car and canvas-covered truck were parked before her house. Petrified, she managed to back into a doorway and watch. What did it all mean, this black car, these SS troops, this truck with its sinister swastika on its side? Gathered out front, a curious crowd of a dozen people made it difficult for Anna to have a clear view.
Suddenly two soldiers emerged from her house, carrying her father by his arms. He attempted to escape their hold. One soldier cracked him across the head with the butt of a pistol, which knocked Solomon into semiconsciousness. Too frightened to weep, too fearful to move, Anna crouched into the doorway and tried to disappear into the building's bricks.
The soldier roughly threw her father against the side of the truck and held him there. From this vantage point she could see half of his face was dark with blood. Anna bit the back of her hand so hard that hours later teeth marks remained.
Three more Gestapo troops emerged from the house, pushing her weeping mother and Jacob before them at gunpoint. Her parents managed to touch hands briefly, as Esta and Jacob were forced into the back of the truck.
There was a heated discussion among the soldiers. Suddenly, the colonel tired of the debate, raised a pistol to her father's head, and fired. A spray of blood and brains hit the side of the truck as the bullet exited, and Solomon's body fell to the ground in a crumpled heap.
The small crowd stood in shocked silence. No one moved.
"Let this be a lesson to all filthy Communist Jews who defy the Reich! We will cleanse Czechoslovakia just as we are cleansing Germany!" shouted the Nazi colonel who had just murdered Anna's father. The assembled onlookers were stunned, afraid to flee, afraid to move, for fear of meeting the same fate as their neighbor. The colonel then turned with an arrogant huff, as if he were wasting his breath on such ignorant vermin, and got into his car.
Anna heard her mother's pitiful, muffled screams; then things began to go black. Her knees buckled, but she clung to the wall and remained on her feet. She watched as life as she knew it was stamped out like a spent cigarette and casually tossed in the gutter. She wanted to run to the crowd of people in front of her house and beg them for help, but whom could she trust? She didn't recognize any of her family's friends among them. The SS had Mother and Jacob. They would surely want her too.
Her father's lifeless body was thrown onto the truck as if it were a sack of flour. The other officers calmly got into their sedan and sped away, leaving nothing behind but eerie stillness and the scent of fresh diesel fumes.
Once the Nazis departed, the crowd began to react excitedly to the tragedy. Some women wept, while most others simply stood clucking their tongues like a flock of chickens, sure that somehow Kippelstein had deserved the wrath of the Gestapo. Events had spun out with such speed that none of the Kippelstein's Jewish neighbors had had time to gather and witness them. They would learn of the treachery secondhand. Just then everyone's attention was drawn upward. They pointed and cried out. The dark sky pulsed with an ugly orange glow. The Watch Works was on fire!
A teenage boy ran off towards the nearest firebox to summon the fire brigade, while the rest stood helplessly and watched the flames leap about in a ghastly dance behind the ancient leaded glass windows. As the heat grew more intense, the glass shattered and sent a rain of deadly splinters down upon the rough cobblestones below. The crowd had to retreat to a safer distance. Transfixed, Anna watched, and heard the approach of sirens. But it was too late; nothing could save the factory now.
She stumbled away from the doorway. Her mind spun with fierce speed, like a top that was about to wobble out of control and shoot across the floor. Daniel. She had to find her brother. Perhaps together they could figure out what to do. The crowd of neighbors, distracted by the fire and still gabbing like magpies over the events leading to the murder of Solomon Kippelstein, did not notice Anna slip away, running, bound for St. Jude's school.
(that is the end of chapter one)
While the days were growing noticeably longer and spring was waiting just offstage, the sun had set at least a half hour before Solomon Kippelstein usually quit work, at 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, and walked the hundred steps to his home next door. Solomon Kipplestein was dark-haired and slender and moved with an absentminded grace. His short sideburns revealed the slightest flecks of gray, and unlike more Orthodox men, he was clean-shaven. His left eyelid drooped just slightly, sometimes giving the impression he was calm and perhaps a little slow mentally, which was not the case. He ran the Kippelstein Watch Works, a business established by his great-grandfather and passed along through generations to him. April was a comparatively quiet time of year for the business. Eighteen- and twenty-hour days were common for him in August, September, and October when Christmas inventories were being built and shipped. About 45 percent of the company's sales were made at Christmas, the rest spread throughout the year.
A Kippelstein watch was arguably one of the finest and most reliable east of Switzerland. It was nothing for a fifty-year-old Kippelstein watch to be brought back to the factory for a new crystal face, which had broken due to some odd accident, while the watch itself, if wound properly, had never missed a single second. In fifty years! Solomon's pride in the company and its products was fierce beyond words and exceeded only by his pride in his family.
The Kippelstein home and the Watch Works were located on the fringes of the Old Town section of Prague. Here, the streets were narrow, leading to many a tiny courtyard with narrower alleys between ancient, frescoed tenements. The rooftops were a rust-colored brown and steeply angled to prevent winter snows from piling up too high. Some of the buildings dated back to the ninth century. The factory was in a twelfth-century edifice that had been modernized considerably. Their home was of more recent vintage, rebuilt after a mid-nineteenth-century fire destroyed a previous structure.
Esta Kippelstein sat with her nine-year-old son Jacob in the kitchen, enjoying a milk and kolachy break. Esta had pale white skin and jet-black hair the consistency of steel wool. Her nervous energy could, at times, put others on edge. But her smile was disarming and her gray eyes often shined with mischief when they weren't furrowed with worry. Despite having borne three children, she barely tipped the scales past 110 pounds. Nearby, Vlasta, the Kippelstein's cook and housekeeper, peeled potatoes for their dinner. Esta calmly corrected Jacob's hurried stuffing of kolachys down his throat as if he were a starving bird.
"Please, Jacob. One at a time and slowly, or you'll choke to death."
His love of kolachys, as well as most food, made Jacob slightly pudgy in build. His dark, wiry hair repelled all combs. His eyeglasses were constantly slipping down his nose and just as constantly he pushed them back in front of his eyes. Vlasta, a big-boned peasant girl of great strength and joyous laughter, was famous in the neighborhood for her culinary skills and kolachys, a round, doughy pastry filled with poppy seed or apricot or prune preserves, were one of her specialties.
It was a little after six when Esta noticed that fifteen-year-old Anna was late returning from her piano lesson. Her other son, fourteen-year-old Daniel, was a full-time student at St. Jude's, a boys' school on the southeast side of Prague. Esta went to the living room window, which faced the street, and nervously spied out. No Anna. She unconsciously twirled her hair into tight locks like unraveled watch springs. Before the Nazi invasion just a month ago, Esta would not have given Anna's absence a second thought. But now with Prague under martial law, German soldiers were everywhere, and the tension was palpable.
This tension was of little concern to Anna right then. As the dark, heavy clouds of the day began to slowly breakup, Anna detoured through the Old Town Square and down the main shopping avenues. Anna had long, light brown hair and blue eyes with the warm luster of pearls, belying a playful side to her serious demeanor. She had a fine linear nose and a smile that, when she chose to exhibit it, could brighten a room. She wore a dark gray wool skirt that flowed to mid-calf and a white blouse that buttoned down the back and had lace around the collar. Her stylish but rather thin navy blue jacket was often unsuccessful at keeping the wind and cold out. She didn't care. She sensed spring was near, and it elated her.
So Anna dilly-dallied, looking at the luminous treasures beckoning from the store windows. One displayed elegant women's clothing; one jewelry and fine crystal; another men's shoes and belts; still another, kitchenware. This evening she lingered outside Melnik's, a small store that sold children's clothing and toys. Her attention was caught by an intricately fashioned dollhouse, its back open to the street, fully decorated with tiny furnishings and tiny people.
Most captivating of all, the dollhouse contained a miniature modern bathroom, complete with shower. Daniel had told her all about the group showers at St. Jude's, and despite his disdain for them, she yearned to try a shower bath. Naturally St. Jude's facilities lacked the privacy of this luxurious dollhouse's creation, which Anna thought must be like bathing in a warm summer rain.
Anna was a dreamer. For her, a dollhouse behind the dusty window of Melnik's became more than a plaything. She placed herself inside it, in her mind's eye, applying deep red lipstick at the Art Deco dressing table, wearing a white silk and marabou trimmed robe, pinching her lips, just like the movie star Jean Harlow, preparing for a date.
Books could also whisk Anna off into whatever world had been created on the page before her. She liked to imagine herself in the story and unselfconsciously created elaborate additions to the works featuring herself as heroine. She read everything she could get her hands on, sometimes neglecting math problems and biology assignments in favor of fiction. That evening, along with her piano music, she clasped two books: a collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories and a copy of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. She had been instantly smitten with Huck and the mighty Mississippi. The boy, about her age, with his beguiling innocence and honesty and the verdant open spaces of mid-nineteenth century Missouri, all seemed so different from the cold gray armed camp that Prague had become. As a result, lately her mind wasn't in her hometown, harassed by Nazis and curfews, but transplanted to America, where she'd go calmly rafting down the majestic Mississippi River. She could almost smell the massed wood violets at the great river's shore, hear the suck of the pole as it pulled free from the muddy bottom, feel the bump of the channel catfish nosing about the raft.
A German soldier on a motorcycle sped loudly past Melnik's. Reluctantly Anna shook off her reverie and left the shop window. She realized they might be worried about her at home. She knew the occupation had change things irrevocably. She began to head back.
Esta and Solomon had witnessed from afar the Germans invasion of neighboring Austria in March the year before and saw the viciousness with which the Nazis dealt with Jews, Communists, and anyone else they decided they didn't like. They had heard about Mauthausen, the first concentration camp outside of Germany, constructed near Linz, and rumors flew about the frightening number of executions and general deplorable conditions (prisoners forced to mine with no tools, just bare hands). But they were just rumors; things couldn't be that bad, could they? There was no denying that after the Anschluss in Austria, Czechoslovakia was now surrounded on three sides by the Third Reich. Austrian Jews were being forced to hand over their wealth and property to the Reich in exchange for permits to leave Austria. Those Jews without wealth were being shipped to Mauthausen.
Many Jews in Prague, aware of what was happening, had fled their homeland that summer. On the other hand, the Kippelsteins, along with many others, felt that Austria was the end of the line in the Nazis' plans for expansion (the Austrian population was mostly German, after all), that the Germans wanted nothing to do with Czechoslovakia and besides, the other European nations wold never stand for another German invasion. But in late September Hitler set his sights on the Sudetenland, a small region in northern Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany and had been cut away from the the Fatherland after World War I as part of the armistice.
On September 30, 1938, under threat of German invasion, Great Britain and France agreed to let Hitler take over the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia and allowed the Germans first to dissolve the elected government in Prague and then to install Supreme Court Justice Dr. Emil Hacha, who was sixty-five years old and in the early stages of senility, at the head of a puppet government. To Solomon and Esta's complete astonishment, all the major European powers, including Great Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, subscribed to Hitler's claims that the Sudetenland was really part of Germany and Czechoslovakia was still under Czech control. The United States stood by quietly and proclaimed its neutrality. With Hacha's foggy mental condition, Czechoslovakia was on the verge of chaos within six months. On March 15, 1939, Hacha went to Berlin and Hitler made him sign a declaration allowing the German Army to overrun the remainder of the country "to protect" Czechoslovakia.
The Kippelsteins, as well as nearly all of their countrymen, awaited the world's outrage and prompt military response to the invasion. But none came. Unarmed and with no army of their own, the Czechs could only watch as the German SS was sent in to terrorize politicians and intellectuals, take over the press, and dehumanize Jews. New rules appeared. No Jews on trolleys. No Jews in theaters. No Jews allowed on the streets from 8 P.M. until 6 A.M. Jews could shop only from noon to 4 P.M. Solomon and Esta had read in the Czech newspapers with deep concern about the Krystalnacht that had occurred in Germany just five months before, where Jews' property was seized or destroyed and the Germans rescinded any remaining civil rights the Jews hadn't already lost since the Nazis came to power in 1933. Now the Nazis were completely in charge in Czechoslovakia, an with their control of the Czech press, there was little or no coverage of the Germans' murderous campaign of terror.
Solomon immediately began to plan his family's escape. It took a week for the Czech borders to reopen slightly for the purposes of commerce. He sent Anton, his most trusted employee, to Zurich on the pretext of picking up watch screws and other parts. There Anton opened up an account in the company's name at the Union Bank of Switzerland with a wad of cash (just over $1000 worth) sewn into the lining of his leather satchel. Solomon raised further cash by closing one back account (before it was frozen and confiscated) and pawning a gold necklace, some hand-painted Venetian glassware with gold leaf he and Esta had received as a wedding present, and two sterling silver candelabras. The items only brought a third of what they would have prior to the invasion, but it was money. In the next two weeks at the first opportunity, the Kippelsteins would escape south to Hungary, their eventual goal being Switzerland. Not a word was mentioned to the children.
At 6:15 that evening, about the time Anna tore herself away from Melnik's store window, the Kippelsteins' back door flew open, and Solomon ran in, panting heavily, with no hat, his shirt partly untucked, his black wool coat unbuttoned and flowing like a cape. He slammed the door shut behind him. Esta jumped up, knowing something was amiss because Solomon never came in the back door and rarely came home even a few minutes early.
"Sol! What has happened?!" she cried anxiously.
"Hurry. There's no time. Where is Anna?"
"Anna's at her piano lesson but she'll be back soon. Solomon, tell me, what's wrong?!"
Catching his breath, he supported himself against the staircase newel post. "The Germans. They're at the factory, looking for me. I ran out the back. They'll be here anytime now. Hurry! Put all your jewelry in a valise. We can use it to buy passage. We must run now. We'll fetch Daniel from school and then make for the border."
But it was too late. Heavy footsteps stomped on the walk and up to the front door. A booted foot kicked it open.
Esta and Solomon watched in disbelief and horror as the hated storm troopers entered their home. Solomon pushed his wife back into the kitchen and then stepped forward to confront the Nazis.
An SS colonel in jet-black uniform stepped through the broken door and five soldiers dressed in mouse gray followed. Their breeches bagged at the thighs and their black boots rose to the knees. Each man wore a scarlet band with a black and white swastika on the left arm. The colonel had a Ritterkruez, or Knight's Cross, at his neck and a First Class Iron Cross on his Totenkopf, or death's head, worn only by the SS, and above that a sliver German eagle with spread wings held a swastika in a wreath. His left collar had a black rectangle with three silver diamonds; his right collar tow SS lightning bolts. He word a black leather belt with cross strap and side-arm holster. Two soldiers carried 9mm MP-40 submachine guns.
"You broke our door. Why didn't you just knock?" Solomon asked, his voice quavering more from anger than fear.
The tall SS colonel dismissed the words as if they had never been uttered.
"You are Solomon Kippelstein?" asked the colonel.
"Yes. What do you want?" Solomon again was ignored.
"Take him outside," the officer commanded. Two of his men took Solomon by the arms and dragged him out the door.
"Find the rest of them," the colonel barked to the other three troops.
In the kitchen Esta frantically pulled Jacob to his feet, as he stuffed one last kolachy into his mouth. "Quick, upstairs!" she said under her breath.
"Why?!" he cried.
"Hurry!" she countered with quiet determination.
They ran up the back stairs.
Vlasta watched dumbfounded. She had heard the whispered stories. Now they were here for the Kippelsteins. Still holding a wooden spoon caked with kolachy dough, she stood frozen with fear.
The men marched into her kitchen, and glancing at the half-empty glasses of milk on the table, their leader demanded, "Where are they?"
"Who?" she retorted, feigning ignorance.
"The wife, the children, you stupid Slovak! Where are they?!"
"Gone," Vlasta answered.
"Search upstairs," he commanded a private.
Anna turned the corner to her street, but stopped in her tracks as if her feet were suddenly encased in cement. A German car and canvas-covered truck were parked before her house. Petrified, she managed to back into a doorway and watch. What did it all mean, this black car, these SS troops, this truck with its sinister swastika on its side? Gathered out front, a curious crowd of a dozen people made it difficult for Anna to have a clear view.
Suddenly two soldiers emerged from her house, carrying her father by his arms. He attempted to escape their hold. One soldier cracked him across the head with the butt of a pistol, which knocked Solomon into semiconsciousness. Too frightened to weep, too fearful to move, Anna crouched into the doorway and tried to disappear into the building's bricks.
The soldier roughly threw her father against the side of the truck and held him there. From this vantage point she could see half of his face was dark with blood. Anna bit the back of her hand so hard that hours later teeth marks remained.
Three more Gestapo troops emerged from the house, pushing her weeping mother and Jacob before them at gunpoint. Her parents managed to touch hands briefly, as Esta and Jacob were forced into the back of the truck.
There was a heated discussion among the soldiers. Suddenly, the colonel tired of the debate, raised a pistol to her father's head, and fired. A spray of blood and brains hit the side of the truck as the bullet exited, and Solomon's body fell to the ground in a crumpled heap.
The small crowd stood in shocked silence. No one moved.
"Let this be a lesson to all filthy Communist Jews who defy the Reich! We will cleanse Czechoslovakia just as we are cleansing Germany!" shouted the Nazi colonel who had just murdered Anna's father. The assembled onlookers were stunned, afraid to flee, afraid to move, for fear of meeting the same fate as their neighbor. The colonel then turned with an arrogant huff, as if he were wasting his breath on such ignorant vermin, and got into his car.
Anna heard her mother's pitiful, muffled screams; then things began to go black. Her knees buckled, but she clung to the wall and remained on her feet. She watched as life as she knew it was stamped out like a spent cigarette and casually tossed in the gutter. She wanted to run to the crowd of people in front of her house and beg them for help, but whom could she trust? She didn't recognize any of her family's friends among them. The SS had Mother and Jacob. They would surely want her too.
Her father's lifeless body was thrown onto the truck as if it were a sack of flour. The other officers calmly got into their sedan and sped away, leaving nothing behind but eerie stillness and the scent of fresh diesel fumes.
Once the Nazis departed, the crowd began to react excitedly to the tragedy. Some women wept, while most others simply stood clucking their tongues like a flock of chickens, sure that somehow Kippelstein had deserved the wrath of the Gestapo. Events had spun out with such speed that none of the Kippelstein's Jewish neighbors had had time to gather and witness them. They would learn of the treachery secondhand. Just then everyone's attention was drawn upward. They pointed and cried out. The dark sky pulsed with an ugly orange glow. The Watch Works was on fire!
A teenage boy ran off towards the nearest firebox to summon the fire brigade, while the rest stood helplessly and watched the flames leap about in a ghastly dance behind the ancient leaded glass windows. As the heat grew more intense, the glass shattered and sent a rain of deadly splinters down upon the rough cobblestones below. The crowd had to retreat to a safer distance. Transfixed, Anna watched, and heard the approach of sirens. But it was too late; nothing could save the factory now.
She stumbled away from the doorway. Her mind spun with fierce speed, like a top that was about to wobble out of control and shoot across the floor. Daniel. She had to find her brother. Perhaps together they could figure out what to do. The crowd of neighbors, distracted by the fire and still gabbing like magpies over the events leading to the murder of Solomon Kippelstein, did not notice Anna slip away, running, bound for St. Jude's school.
(that is the end of chapter one)
I
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