Black Cross
Authors: Greg IlesNarrator: Dick Hill
Duration: 21H 11m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Tags: triller - adventure - war - psychology - historical
Again, great narration by Dick Hill.
This book is what would happen if The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or events from WW2 were converted into a novel.
In no way light and relaxing book, full of pain and suffering.
Lot’s of tension, humour and description of suffering in concentration camps.
The thing that I didn’t really like was the ending
Quotes:
I know I am a doctor — a damn good one — but when I stand, or stood, beside my grandfather, I always felt more like an apprentice, a bright but inexperienced student in the shadow of a master.
You always said you were a tough old girl, but you are not so old, and no one should have to spend their life with only memories.
It is a curious fact that men who share extreme hardship — even those who previously dislike or even hate each other — form unspoken bonds that last forever. Not because of insensitivity or stupidity do armies train their recruits by driving them up to and beyond the point of maximum endurance. For thousands of years this system has forged the callow young men of numberless nations into soldiers ready to die for their comrades — even if these comrades are bound only by common hatred of their tormentor: the army.
One imagined SS officers to be monsters, sterile machines that obeyed orders to rape and massacre — not human beings who quaintly compared their childhood romances to Romeo and Juliet.
let us say that the SS is not the ideal organization for an educated man. Not even for a half-educated man like me. Educated men tend to ask questions, and questions are verboten in the SS.
War brings opportunities to men who in normal times suppress darker appetites. … “But frankly, if we win the war, none of that will ever be brought up in polite conversation, much less in a court of law. The butchers will be heroes.”
McConnell was aware that the prime minister exploited every facet of his daunting charisma to sway others to his cause, yet despite this awareness he could not but be affected by it.
Hurrying across the frozen fields, McConnell realized that the cold here was of an entirely different magnitude than that in Scotland. He should have prepared himself. Did it take a genius to figure out that in northern Germany, wind blowing from the north was coming from the Arctic? They were only twenty miles from the Baltic coast. The wind blasted across this plain like the fulfillment of a Norse curse, the uniforms he and Stern wore useless against its power.
He had expected some horror stories. For months rumor had been rife in England about the brutality of the Nazi detention camps. But Anna’s diary had little to do with brutality. Brutality was a universal flaw in the human character, commonplace in every society. This diary described atrocities committed on another scale altogether. Even outright murder seemed banal in the face of what he had read in the last hour. One of the most alarming passages had had its effect because of who was involved, as much as what was done.
That Anna Kaas had accomplished something no one before her ever had. She had changed his fundamental belief about the futility of violence. All his life he had stood with his father against war. But tonight, simple written words had bred a cold light that revealed to him something worse than war — or perhaps a new kind of war — a war of mankind upon itself. A self-consuming madness that could only end in complete annihilation. His medical experience gave him the perfect metaphor for his new understanding. Cancer. The system that had created Totenhausen — and the dozen other camps he had read of in the diary — was a malignant melanoma festering within the human species. It moved maliciously, under cover of a more conventional malady, but it would eventually destroy everything in its path. And like any melanoma, it could not be stopped without destroying healthy tissue in the process.
Jonas Stern tried to keep himself conscious as Sergeant Sturm worked on him. The man showed an aptitude for his job. He had enthusiasm, which was important. Physical torture was tiring work.
As horrifying as it was, McConnell knew this was but a shadow of the devastation that lay in store if twentieth-century science were completely harnessed to the engine of warfare.