In All the Horrors of War (published by Johns Hopkins University Press), Bernice Lerner follows the remarkable lives of Rachel Genuth, a 15-year-old Jewish teenager from the Hungarian provinces, and Brigadier Hugh Llewelyn Glyn Hughes, a high-ranking military doctor in the British Second Army. The two stories finally converge in Bergen-Belsen, where the girl fights for her life and the doctor struggles to save thousands on the brink of death.
The book begins at the end: with Hughes's searing testimony at the September 1945 trial of Josef Kramer, commandant of Bergen-Belsen, along with forty-four SS (Schutzstaffel) members and guards. "I have been a doctor for thirty years and seen all the horrors of war," Hughes said, "but I have never seen anything to touch it." The narrative then jumps back to the spring of 1944, following both Hughes and Rachel as they navigate their respective forms of wartime hell until confronting the worst: Christianstadt's prisoners, including Rachel, are deposited in Bergen-Belsen, and the British Second Army, having finally breached the fortress of Germany, assumes control of the ghastly camp after a negotiated surrender. Though they never met, it was Hughes's commitment to helping as many prisoners as possible that saved Rachel's life.
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