The Letter: A Novel

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

The horrors of the Holocaust are now all too well known to the world; they are denied only by a few irrational apologists for the fascist regime. During the war years and immediately afterward, however, the truth was not so evident. People were understandably reluctant to believe that any nation could have perpetrated so monstrous a crime of genocide. This era of disbelief, and the rising determination of those who had survived and knew the truth to force the world to see and to believe, is the backdrop of The Letter.

Signed by Adolf Hitler himself, the letter spelled death for the Jews, and it is a vital piece of evidence of a crime against humanity. Now it is missing. Taken from the body of a murdered courier, it has fallen into the possession of Helga Raben, a German Jew in flight for her life after the death of her parents. She has managed to place the crucial letter in safe-keeping in a Swiss bank. Now, German agents determined to obscure the horrible truth will stop at nothing to retrieve the incriminating document.

The story of flight and pursuit, of dedication and of martyrdom, makes powerful and compelling reading.