The Boys in the Light: An Extraordinary World War II Story of Survival, Faith, and Brotherhood - Hardcover

Willner, Nina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059347127X ISBN 13: 9780593471272

Verlag: Dutton, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

“This beautifully braided story...reveals the best and worst of humanity. A magnificent work of narrative nonfiction, true to the past and essential for the present.”—Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of Lost in Shangri-La and 13 Hours

An epic true story of the triumph of good over evil.

The Boys in the Light follows the parallel journeys of Company D and Eddie Willner, the author’s father, as they are caught up on two sides of World War II.

At sixteen, Eddie Willner was among the millions of European Jews rounded up by Hitler’s Nazis. He was forced into slave labor alongside his father and his best friend, Mike, and spent the next three years of his life surviving the death camps, including Auschwitz. Meanwhile, in the United States, boys only a few years older than Eddie were joining the army and heading toward their own precarious futures. Once farmers, factory workers, and coal miners, they were suddenly untested soldiers, thrust into the brutal conflicts of WWII.

A company of 3rd Armored Division tankers, led by 23-year-old Elmer Hovland, quickly became battle-hardened and weary, constantly questioning whether the war was worth it. They got their answer when two emaciated boys stepped out of the woods with their tattooed arms raised.

The Boys in the Light is a testament to survival against all odds, the strength of the bonds forged during war and the resilience of the human spirit. This extraordinary true story is a must-read for fans of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown, and Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nina Willner is the author of Forty Autumns, which Publishers Weekly called “a thrilling and relevant read,” and which is still being feverishly read by book clubs eight years post-publication. Prior to her writing career, Nina was a U.S. Army intelligence officer who served in Berlin during the Cold War. Following her career in intelligence, Nina worked in Moscow, Minsk, Prague, Ottawa, and Istanbul promoting human rights, children’s causes, and the rule of law for the U.S. government, nonprofits, and a variety of charities. She is married, has three grown children, and after a life living abroad, has settled in Washington, DC. Her father, Eddie Willner, survived the Holocaust, and this is his story.

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One

American Innocence

The 1930s

It always starts with innocence.

Eight-year-old Elmer Hovland stood steadfast on the dusty plains beneath the big open skies of Kenneth, Minnesota, wheat-blond hair waving in the wind, his clear blue eyes taking on the color of the sky.

His parents, Nels and Mary, were devout Lutheran immigrants from Oppland, Norway, who, in the late 1890s, along with a million other Norwegians, left poverty and hunger in their homeland for a pioneering life on the great plains of Minnesota.

They lived at first in a sod house, then eventually settled into a simple log home they built themselves, a spartan dwelling with no electricity or modern conveniences, with an icebox to keep food cold and a wood-burning cast-iron cookstove, which helped heat the home. They drew their water from a well and had an outhouse in the backyard. It was the definition of an austere life.

Moving to a new country was difficult enough, but the Great Depression brought hard times and distress, especially in the farming sector. Despite the hardships, the Hovlands settled into their new life on Dakota tribal land platted only at the turn of the century, with towns seven miles apart, because that's as far as you could go in one day in a horse and buggy.

They set up a farm just outside Kenneth, population 118, a tranquil town one square mile in size with one crossroad, and became a part of the patchwork fabric of Scandinavian immigrant families drawn by the timber, mining, and farming industries rooted in Minnesota's barren, windswept plains, river valleys, and cold climate. In many ways it was not unlike the land they had left behind.

The Hovlands and those like them lived in relative isolation, but there was new opportunity for growth and prosperity in this land of rolling hills and fertile black soil borne of flat lake plains. The family grew corn, wheat, and barley and raised dairy cows and chickens, laboring on a land that carried its story in the winds of its dusty promise. Unable to cope with the changes and homesickness, many went back to the land of the midnight sun, but the Hovlands stayed on and built a life.

By 1930, they were living an uncomplicated existence grounded in hard work, their days marked by sobriety and an abstemious reverence for the pure and simple.

Guided by their deep Lutheran faith, a pious family who believed in the power of prayer, the Hovlands bowed their heads at every meal, prayed over their crops, knelt bedside at night, and woke up every morning asking for God's blessings on every new day.

Faith helped them weather every challenge they encountered, from the heavy black clouds of the Depression years to droughts that marred the land for a time. The family was thrifty and frugal: they made their own or did without. Nels didn't talk much, believing that the hardest truths could be spoken with the fewest words, and he instilled in his children an upstanding propriety rooted in the rectitude of his Norse ancestral lineage. He taught them that an honest day's work was a virtue, that a man had to be competent and skilled, and that he had to have a backbone to get a job done right.

Nels taught Elmer at an early age how to wield tools and build things. At twelve years old, Elmer surprised his mother with the family's first clock, which he had carved out of red pine, working over many months to master the inner workings of the intricate mechanical parts, the gear train and time hands, trying to get it to work. His mother praised his ingenuity and placed his creation up on the mantel of their log cabin, where it became the centerpiece of an otherwise unadorned home. For a family who had only ever known the time by the positioning of the sun in the sky, Elmer's clock was a luxury.

Above all else, Nels and Mary emphasized sound moral character; that one should lead with the virtues of kos, warmth and compassion, and janteloven, the self-deprecating concept that family and community, the group, was always more important than one individual standing alone; that each member was a thread woven into the tapestry of a greater good.

While Nels still read the Norwegian News and the family still embraced their native customs, singing old Norse songs, speaking Norwegian around the dinner table, ice fishing in the winter, and celebrating around midsummer bonfires, and Mary and the girls griddled up lefse during the holidays, the Hovlands embraced life in the United States and acclimated well to their new home. They even gave their children American names, making sure Elmer LeRoy and his siblings learned the words to the national anthem.

Though hard work, dust storms, and privation were harsh realities, it didn't occur to Elmer that life was difficult. A happy, humble, seemingly ordinary boy, he faced his days tilling soil and baling hay with an eager optimism.

Despite his serious affect, young Elmer was the epitome of winsome American boyhood. When he wasn't at school or helping on the farm, he could be found immersed in the simplest of bucolic childhood pleasures in the verdant playgrounds of nature: taking walks among the tall June prairie grasses and dallying through wildflower meadows in his blue cotton dungarees. His idea of a perfect afternoon was to walk barefoot down to the fishing hole, reel in a pike, skip stones across the surface of the lake, then fling himself off a rock into the cool water. He learned how to swim by jumping off a bridge into the Rock River, and for fun and frolic, he and his brother hopped railroad cars that came through Kenneth. A farm boy at heart, Elmer's playgrounds were the vast open spaces of an unsullied landscape where green cornfields met the blue sky on the horizon, and where at night one could gaze at a million stars that spanned the great Minnesota sky.

By the mid-1930s, millions of immigrants had settled across the United States, eager to become a part of mainstream America. Encouraged by President Roosevelt's welcoming words to root and assimilate, to plant and to build, they were grateful to be given an opportunity to forge a new future. They came together to support and learn from one another, to establish their communities, and to contribute to America's greater purpose and aspirations.

By the time he reached adolescence, Elmer was solidly grounded in faith, tethered to his family and to his community. While his mother swept a dusty porch as tumbleweeds rolled by and his father tinkered with farm machinery, young Elmer looked to the horizon and wondered where life would take him, certain of only one thing-that the Lord would lead the way.

On the other side of the country, just outside the densely populated cosmopolis of Boston, lived another boy from another immigrant family.

As streetcars and trolleys clanged, making their way past peddler pushcarts and commuter carriages, and horse-drawn carts clopped their way around vendors hawking their wares in the market district, the Custom House Tower near Boston Harbor stood watch over a bustling humanity of nearly 800,000 in a city that was home to the Revolutionary American independence movement and aptly known as the Cradle of Liberty.

On the streets, men with Brylcreemed hair wore derby bowlers in the city and boater hats on the waterfront as ladies shopped the market district. It was a city teeming with immigrant laborers toiling in shoe, garment, and rubber factories. Boston newspapers ran the scores coming out of Fenway Park and announced horse-race winners in between pages of ads for Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes. In a city where the end of Prohibition was celebrated with gusto, taprooms once again served up gin rickeys, burlesque tempted, and organized crime operated just under the surface as tommy gun-wielding gangsters hung back in the shadows between iconic American landmarks,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059347127X
• ISBN 13: 9780593471272
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Dutton; https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/; ; Im Mittelfeld 25; K?ln; Deutschland; 51105; Deutschland