La cruz torcida

In 1934, the young English writer Sally Carson had the audacity to write, almost in real time, during the same historical moment as the events she narrates, a novel that is a portrait of an ordinary family in southern Germany during the dark rise of Nazism. Carson died a few years later—from breast cancer—and the novel fell into oblivion until its recent rediscovery in 2025 in the United Kingdom. This has allowed today's readers to discover a first-rate literary work that, even at the dawn of Nazism, alerted the world to the horrors that were occurring in Germany and those that were to come while the leaders of other major powers looked the other way. The plot of *The Crooked Cross* spans no more than six months, from Christmas Eve 1932 to the summer solstice of 1933, but in that time the lives of the Kluger family, their friends, and the entire country are turned upside down. The protagonist, Lexa Kluger, watches as her brothers, unemployed and mired in apathy, like so many other young people, gradually fall into the clutches of a Nazi party that promises them work and stability. As the strategy of persecution and racial discrimination takes hold, Lexa's fiancé, Moritz Weissmann, a young Catholic surgeon, loses his job because of his Jewish surname, and very quickly, the boundaries of his life begin to shrink until they become suffocating. Their beautiful love story must then unfold in secret.