Two Necklaces

In the beginning of 1933 after Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany, fourteen-year-old Christa Becker of Ravensburg, Germany, attends meetings of the League of German Girls, an organization established to create dedicated wives whose role was to give birth to superior Aryan children. At home she eagerly shares the new regime’s ideology with her brother Jürgen, but he protests the threads of anti-Semitism that are weaving their way into German culture. He is attacked by a thuggish member of the Hitler Youth for refusing to distance himself from a close Jewish friend. The attack leaves him severely brain damaged. As the facts of the attack become known and Christa begins to question the regime’s teachings, she meets Paul, a Jewish jeweler. The events that bring them together throw her life and her family into turmoil. Determined to break loose from the tight leash of her father, an engineer doing work for the Nazis, Christa enlists the help of her grandmother to navigate her developing relationship with Paul.

As the years advance, Jewish shops and businesses are boycotted, concentration camps are established and laws passed barring Jews from holding government or university positions. Jews are no longer considered German citizens nor can they marry Aryans or fly the German flag. A lull in these escalating anti-Semitic measures occurs in 1936, as Hitler, bent on creating an image of a new strong and united Germany, masks the targeting of Jews while readying the country for the summer Olympic Games. The lessening of overt hostilities gives Christa a false sense of security that the persecution of Jews has calmed causing her to take risks that set her and everyone she loves in the path of Nazi destruction. Hair-raising, nail-biting turmoil ensues but she refuses to back down from her burning desire to be with Paul.

Written by award winning, international best-selling author, Paulette Mahurin, Two Necklaces is not an ordinary love story. It is a story of a German girl’s coming of age and daring to think for herself at a time when that very act was dangerous, even life-threatening. No, this is not an ordinary love and resistance story. It is much more complex, delving into the very nature of the human condition, prone to change, invested with frailty and strength and the struggle of mind and heart. It is a story that will keep the reader guessing to the very last page what the outcome will be.