Berlin is no longer safe.
For five years, Lina’s cousins have watched their world shrink under Adolf Hitler’s regime. Businesses confiscated. Rights stripped away. Friends vanished. After Kristallnacht, hope turns to urgency: they must leave Germany-or face deportation.
An ocean away in Connecticut, Lina’s life is steady and predictable-until a letter arrives assigning her an unexpected mission: rescue three relatives she has never met from the tightening grip of Nazi terror.
Navigating immigration quotas, mounting paperwork, and a world reluctant to open its doors to Jewish refugees, Lina discovers that goodwill alone cannot outpace political reality. Every delay carries consequences. Every decision could determine survival.
Based on actual correspondence, When the World was Broken traces the intertwined struggles of a Jewish family in Berlin and an ordinary American woman determined to help them. It chronicles the rise of antisemitism, the desperate race for emigration, and the fragile hope that flickers even in history’s darkest hours.
A powerful work of World War II historical fiction, this novel captures the human cost of waiting too long and the courage required to act before it is too late.
