Mrs. Wallenberg: a Holocaust romance by J. Michael Dolan
The novel Mrs. Wallenberg opens in 1997 with the aged if still feisty Berber Smit recalling the sizzling love affair she had half a century earlier with the greatest hero of the Holocaust. Nor does she stop there, giving an insider’s account of what made Raoul Wallenberg the legend he is today.
EXCERPT: Chapter I. The Pages of My Heart
April 1997
Aberdeen, Scotland
Join me in a story from days gone by that, if you can get past my handwriting, you won’t soon be forgetting.
To look at its author is to see a wrinkling old woman, hair as faded and brittle as pressed flowers. But don’t hold your breath waiting for me to complain. I was twenty once, and by most accounts a beauty—five-foot-nine, hair the yellow of ripe wheat, lips bee-stung, eyes emerald—but nobody save she condemned to die before her time escapes the insults of old age.
It’s enough that a merciful Providence has condescended to keep my memory young. And what memories they are! Of a momentous, murderous era, a time when darkness swept the land, and of a man who in his courage, his compassion, dared raise a lamp against that darkness—a man who, until they stole him from my arms, I had the great good fortune of calling my lover.
