the Raven and Angel

Germany, 1943. The violence of World War II is closing in on the peaceful home of Lucy, a teenager - a non-Jew - and her family as the Allied bombings come ever closer. She is caught up in the Third Reich's growing desperation and paranoia and forced to work for a Nazi official two ranks down from Hitler on the bizarre and seemingly useless task of translating American movie magazines into German. To make matters worse, she is terrorized by the crude advances of her boss's SS messenger, who thinks she would make an excellent mother to the four children he plans to present to the Reich to satisfy the demands imposed on its ideal Aryan soldiers. When she rescues two Jewish women hiding in a neighbor's bombed-out house, her eyes are opened: the rumors of mysterious camps, entire families disappearing, railroad cars meant for cattle but full of people, and worse, unthinkably worse - they are all true. She grows up fast when she joins the anti-Nazi resistance and falls in love with its leader, but he gives her an assignment that proves to be her last: she is captured smuggling documents and jammed into one of those boxcars headed to hell. Using her wits and courage, she struggles to survive the unimaginable horrors of the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, horrors that don't end with the camp's liberation; she must face the equally terrifying and brutal Russian soldiers who have invaded from the Eastern Front - and an uncertain future in the rubble of the Third Reich.