Tale of One January

Albert Maltz (1908–85) was a prizewinning American playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter. His novel The Cross and the Arrow, about the German resistance to the Nazi regime, was distributed to 150,000 American soldiers during the Second World War. He worked on a number of films, including Casablanca, until he was blacklisted during the period of Cold War anti-Communist hysteria. He is best remembered today for his novels A Tale of One January and The Journey of Simon McKeever.

The narration is from the point of view of two women, one French, the other Dutch, whom the Nazi have widowed. The style is touchingly simple… their hopes and fears of rehabilitation come across convincingly and his background details are painfully vivid