The Baker's Secret

If you think you have read all the Holocaust stories, there is always another side of the story you have not been told yet.  Author, Stephen P. Kiernan has come up with just such a novel.  This is the story told through the eyes of a young woman living in the small town of Vergers on the Normandy coast of France. 

Emmanuelle, Emma is living in the darkest days of the war in a village that has been invaded by the German army.  They have set up a base there and taken over the town.  Emma who apprenticed at the side of Ezra Kuchen the baker, now is responsible for baking the daily bread for the invading army.

Her home has been taken to house the Captain of the army.  Her father was imprisoned and then killed by the Nazis.  The baker has also been taken away by the Nazis.  Emma finds her won small way to maintain her dignity and fight back against the oppression, by helping to feed her neighbors.
Under the closely watched eyes of the armed soldiers, Emma builds a clandestine network of neighbors, trading goods with each other to keep people alive, and hopeful until they can be rescued.

This is a story of strength in the face of adversity.  The people who have hope and the ones who lose hope.  How different people justify their actions to survive.  How you can hate a person but in death the hate is gone.  Emma looks at the priest who she did not like and thought, "Here was the war's strangest lesson yet.  All sorts of people - friends and family, yes, but also adversaries and annoyances - all kinds had died.  AS they left behind everything, work, and home and habits and opinions and even hidden chickens, somehow Emma's heart broke for them all, including the ones she couldn't bear.  Somehow their dying made them unhateable."

That is such an important lesson in the end and that even at the worst of times people still have the instinct to help others and hope that things will get better.  When the Allied Forces arrive on
June 5th, 1944 the people of the town are both awed and ready to help them oust the invading German army.

What a wonderful story this is.