Crooked Cross
by Sally Carson

The heroine of the novel, Lexa, watches her brothers being seduced by National Socialism, as
she observes her Catholic fiancé losing his job because he has a Jewish name and, by the summer of ’33, is deprived of basic human rights like sitting on a park bench. But despite the grimness of all this, the novel remains intensely readable as it implicitly asks the question: how could the country of Beethoven and Goethe, Freud and the Bauhaus, be descending into barbarism? Why would the rest of the world not intervene before it was too late?