Short description
Graeme Friedman is a psychotherapist and an award-winning fiction writer whose short stories have appeared internationally. His previous biographical work, Madiba’s Boys:The Stories of Lucas Radebe and Mark Fish, about South African politics, history and football, has received critical acclaim in South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Long description
August 1939. On her summer break from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, the exquisitely talented young South African pianist, Olda Mehr, and her parents, leave London to visit relatives in Eastern Europe. A dreamy holiday descends into nightmare when Germany invades Poland, and the Mehrs find themselves, as Jews, caught up in Hitler’s Holocaust. For Olda, Gestapo torture and the threat of the gas chamber are relieved by letters from her boyfriend, the artist-musician-doctor, Bennie Hermer, now a captain in the South African army fighting in North Africa. After the Allied disaster at Tobruk, Ben is imprisoned in the dusty, dysentery-ridden POW camp at Benghazi. Via infrequent Red Cross messages the couple keep their love, and themselves, alive, until extraordinary daring on both their parts leads to a denouement so incredible that Time Magazine would write it up within days, calling it: ‘Love, Believe it or not’.