The Journey of Anna Eichenwald

This book is a historical novel based in three areas of interest. Two history changing segments of time are integrated with a winsome story. First, the amazing ignominy of a German people and economy, devastated by WWI, who are willing to follow a demagogue into a second war in just 20 short years. Adolf Hitler was a man who failed at almost everything he tried, rising to the rank of corporal as a dispatch runner in WWI. Yet in 1933 he was appointed Chancellor of Germany and a year later the Fuhrer of the German Reich. He predicted a 1000 year reign for the Reich. It lasted just over 12 years. The abstruse core of his attempt of concurring the European continent was the eradication of all Jews from Europe, known as the Holocaust. Second was the inordinate rise in the understanding of elemental physics. This began in 1905 when an obscure Jewish physicist named Albert Einstein published a series of papers on what he called 'special relativity'. He followed this in ten years with the even more remarkable description of general relativity. The advance in this area of science, from the understanding of the elemental structure of the atom, to the almost bizarre quantum mechanics, involved multiple physicists including Niels Bohr, Max Plank, Leo Szilard, Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn and many others. The atomic nucleus was "split" by Otto Hahn which let to something known in atomic physics and a "chain reaction". Multiple physicists who were Jews were forced to leave Europe. Many of these brilliant Nobel Prize winners emigrated to the U. S. and became involved in an effort to develop an A-bomb (known as the Manhattan Project). Eventually this weapon was used to bring WWII to an end. The third segment of the book is the story of Anna Eichenwald. She was an academic surgeon who was respected and admired, but this did not mollify the enemies of her people. As the danger increased, she changed her identity and went 'underground'. She was befriended by the sister of the man she loved, and joined the underground resistance. Eventually she was betrayed, arrested and sent to Buchenwald Prison. In the prison she entered a covert operation that interestingly was not fiction. Because she was an admired Jewish academic, she was singled out for execution. Her survival is the apogee of the book.