Lest we forget
- Book: When We Fall
- Location: England, Poland
- Author: Carolyn Kirby
‘When We Fall’ is historical fiction at its finest.
Author Carolyn Kirby, in her second novel, has woven a meticulously researched story, with strong characters and an almost tactile sense of place and time, around the infamous Katyn massacre of 1940. Here, in a Russian forest close to the modern border with Belarus, 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia were executed by Russian forces.
The opening short chapter – ‘Air’ – is set in Bournemouth in April 2010. In real life, a plane with the Polish President, his wife and 95 other military officers and dignitaries on board has crashed in Smolensk, killing them all as they were on their way to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. A woman in Bournemouth remembers a flight of her own, in an old bi-plane, being flown by a man with the initials SB….
The core of the story starts at an airfield in Essex in Spring 1943, with the chapter heading ‘Stratus’. Vee Katchatourian, desperate to get more flying hours under her belt, is forced by cloud and fog to land at RAF Bradwell Bay, where she meets enigmatic Germanic pilot Stefan Bergel.
In Posen – the occupying German name for Poznań, in western Poland – Ewa Hartman serves officers of the Reich at her father’s Guest House whilst secretly helping the Polish resistance movement, the AK. In the absence of her lover, Stefan – unseen for three years – she is drawn to Obersturmführer Beck, a newly arrived German officer at the Guest House.
Autumn 1943. ‘Cumulus’. Ewa knows she is becoming reckless, and is shocked when Stefan miraculously reappears in Posen. But where has he been for the last three years…and what is he hiding?
Summer 1945. ‘Cirrus’. The war is coming to a close. Loyalties are blurred. The fate of Stefan, Vee, Ewa and Obersturmführer Beck finally converge and dark secrets are uncovered.
Officially published in May 2020, to coincide with the 75th anniversary of VE Day and based on the WWII atrocity of the Katyn massacre, When We Fall is a moving story of three lives forever altered by one fatal choice. And for lovers of TripFiction, the sense of desolation, fear and betrayal in war-torn Poland is particularly palpable.
Highly recommended.
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