To the Very End: Usque ad Finem

He survived a burning sky by grabbing the wrong parachute. She decided to marry him before they'd ever met. July 24, 1944. Twenty-five thousand feet above France, a Lancaster bomber collides with another aircraft in the dark, and rear gunner Johnny Sandulak goes out the back with someone else's parachute and one flying boot. What follows from a French farmhouse running its own quiet war to a forest southwest of Paris hiding over a hundred and fifty Allied airmen is only half the story. Thousands of miles away, on a farm in Manitoba, Wilma Roth reads his name in a newspaper for the first time and tells her sister, with no evidence beyond a photograph and a headline: When he comes home safe, I'm going to marry him. >Based on the author's own interviews with her grandparents about their love story, To the Very End is a novella about the parts of survival that never make it into the official record: a relationship kept alive from an old newspaper clipping and the particular courage it takes to let someone else help carry what you've been carrying alone. Usque ad finem. To the very end.