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5. For Such a Time as This, Reflections on A STONE FOR BREAD: a Nazi Flag in Charlottesville

When I began revising an old manuscript that became A Stone for Bread, I found myself wondering if one more novel portraying a Nazi concentration camp might seem outdated. Yet since I began that revision, authors and filmmakers have continued to powerfully render Nazi Germany and its horrors, as in Anthony Doerr’s novel  All the Light We Cannot See and the film by Costa-Gavras titled Amen.

In the 20th century, wars and revolutions, along with murderous dictatorships, killed uncountable millions, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China and many other places. You can see the list here. But Nazi Germany’s murder of civilians, which is  estimated at more than 28 million (see link), continues to resonate in western consciousness. Yet Hitler’s regime did not perpetrate such massive slaughter by itself. They had many helpers, which even today is sometimes denied.

This past April, Marine Le Pen, a French presidential contender, said in a political speech: “I don’t think France is responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,” the 1942 roundup of 13,000 French Jews who were held at the Vel d’Hiv, Paris’s Winter Velodrome stadium before being deported.

Le Pen’s statement was widely criticized for ignoring the history of French collaboration with the Nazis. The Los Angeles Times, which quoted her remark, noted that approximately 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Only 2,500 survived.

And now America has a President who seems able to furiously castigate business leaders who resign from his economic council but has to be forced by his advisors to tepidly condemn neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. This from a man who holds the office once held by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, extraordinary men who with thousands of American soldiers and civilians were the determinative forces that saved Western democracy.

I suggest this current president pay a visit to France and Omaha Beach and the American cemetery that lies above it.

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A Stone for Bread by Miriam Herin

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  • On May 11, 2020, Miriam’s second novel A Stone for Bread won the 2020 Eric Hoffer competition Legacy Award, which placed the novel on the short list for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. Prior to publication, the Stone for Bread manuscript was a top-ten finalist in the 2014 International Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Novel Competition. In 2016, it was nominated for North Carolina’s prestigious Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Published by Livingston Press of the University of West Alabama, the novel received a starred Kirkus review through the Kirkus Indy program and was cited by Kirkus as an Indy Best book of the year for 2016. It was a 2017 Finalist in the International Book Awards, Literary Fiction category.
    February 21, 2022
  • Coming Soon: THE BASILISK, a novel of 12th Century France
    February 21, 2022
  • Coming Soon, Miriam’s medieval novel THE BASILISK
    February 17, 2022
  • 1. Lucky, The Backstory: A Grassy Field and a Basketball Goal
    April 9, 2019
My Readers Say

With a sharp eye for detail, Herin weaves a riveting and compassionate narrative out of lifelines that have echoed across the decades and become part of my own.

L.C. Fiore

This is a supremely ambitious book from a thoroughly gifted writer.

Joseph Bathanti

But here’s the main thing I have to tell you: A Stone For Bread is an irresistible page-turner.

Judy Goldman
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