The Wedding

It was to be a day of joy, a day of laughter and dancing and fun: September 1, 1939, their wedding day. Brett Hampton, an American reporter, and Anya Laska, a Polish society girl, would declare to family and friends, to the entire world, their love for each other for all of eternity.

Brett had been stationed in Europe to cover the rumblings of war. While there, he was introduced to Anya, a meeting that seemed to be etched by fate. Falling madly in love the moment their eyes locked, dreams of a beautiful future together passed wordlessly between them. Engagement came quickly. As soon as Anya's family would allow, they set their wedding date.

But life, as it so often does, sent Brett and Anya down a different path, down a far more dangerous road. Nazi Germany selected that same day. The dark early morning skies awoke with red and yellow and orange as bombs tore through the small Polish town of Wieluń. Black smoke, almost invisible as it blended with the black of the predawn sky, billowed into the air. They had only one choice as the bombs exploded around them, and fighter planes peppered the streets and Polish civilians with bullets: Run.

But you can only run so long. Sooner or later, you have to stop and fight.

A Supplemental Note:

As the fortunes of war began to turn in 1944 and accelerated in 1945, Soviet forces swept across Poland, driving the Nazi army out. German officers were keenly aware that they could and likely would be prosecuted for war crimes, so they destroyed virtually all of their records as they fled before the Red Army onslaught.

Instead of liberation, however, the Polish people were imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, where they endured forty-five years of Soviet rule. During that time, the communist government destroyed any records that were not flattering to their regime. Consequently, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Poland finally won its freedom in 1991, there was little written history of Poland's participation in World War II.

The Polish people began piecing their World War II history together from diaries, personal letters, and interviews with those who lived through the war. I have endeavored to remain true to that history, the honesty of the Polish people. Almost all of the events depicted in this novel actually happened, though not necessarily in the same location or on the same date.