title: Dark Times of Love & War
author: Taks, Melvin I.
description: The love story is between Michael, a Christian American reporter, representing a major New York newspaper and a Jewish girl Sarah, who is a pastry chef and works in her father’s bakery in Berlin, Germany. Although the love story is fictitious, I’ve made every effort to ensure that this is a true historical novel. From the beautiful Excelsior hotel in Berlin to the horrors of the death camp at Auschwitz and the results of the trials at Nuremberg, you can learn all about it. I invite you to join with Sarah and Michael in their fight to survive Hitler’s Nazi Germany during the years of 1938 - 1945. I promise you a literary adventure you will never forget. It starts when Michael accidentally attends a secret Jewish prayer service in Berlin’s 1938. It goes on to the Berlin Excelsior (Europe’s largest, very lavish hotel) where in 1933, when Hitler assumed the Chancellery of Germany, Curt Elschner refused him the use of his hotel. At the Excelsior, Sarah and her father are given refuge from the Nazis. They run the bakery at the hotel. (It really existed.) From Goebbels, Hitler’s number one man on down, Sarah managed to charm them all, including her associations with those of the Gestapo. Many of the people she meets are real, some are part of the very good and some the very bad. Many of the characters portrayed, really lived and the experiences are true. It is factual history, only the love story is fiction, but that too could be real. You will meet, Max Schmeling, “Germany and Europe’s heavy weight champion and eventual world champion,” who at the time of a pogrom, “Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938,” saved the lives of two Jewish boys. As well, you will meet those responsible for murder and the building of the death camps. I show there were people who helped the Jewish population, as well as German citizens, who were killed by Hitler because they opposed the Nazi party. You will join those Jewish, on the German cruise ship St. Louise, in their thwarted attempt for freedom. Some other experiences in this story will lead you to places, like Heinrich Muller’s Gestapo headquarters, Adolph Hitler’s Chancellery, associations with real resistance movements, underground operations, death in a boxcar ride to Auschwitz and the Auschwitz experience as it really happened, too the Soviet capture and rape of Berlin, the Nuremberg trials and their outcome. All written with feelings of Love, Hate, and Compassion. Please know the doing of this work at times caused me much distress. There were times when writing I cried, but also times of happiness and laughter.