Book excerpt: Love is blind. It isnt something you findit finds you, even in the most unlikely of places. Two souls, searching for humanity and hope amid the unspeakable horrors of war and the devastating authority of hatred, find themselves cast together in the Sachsenhausen work camp during the Second World War and the murderous Holocaust that came swiftly with it. One is in the Nazi labor camp by force, the other by one choice or another. Ingrid Hoffman, a gifted ballerina from Hamburg, and Axel Engel, a promising man fresh from school in Munich, experience an immediate and spontaneous pull to one another. Their budding love, as forbidden as it is blessed, becomes the precious center of their lives. But as essential as it is to their emotional survival in the camps, its very presence puts them at mortal risk amid the camps vast and pitiless machinery of death. Discovery will surely mean death for them both. Together, Ingrid and Axel find ways to help each other get through the day and stand up against the atrocities of Sachsenhausen as two people can. The strength they draw from their relationship is the only way they can protect any measure of humanity the Third Reich seeks to destroy. Paradoxically, the greatest danger to the star-crossed couple comes when Russian troops liberate their lives of abhorrence in the spring of 1945. The price of their freedom is rough justice. Can the lovers survive this one final challenge to their happiness?