I’ve written little new of late. Be it posting blogs full of words penned long ago or dabbling in newborn fictional tales of this, that and the other, a uselessness prevails. A tarnished body and brain in unison tend to have that effect. Be it from quill to keyboard my storytelling is in limbo. So instead, I research, and as all writers of historical fiction will understand research is all. Most fact-finding, inevitably, is of a bland yet on occasion useful, bygone timeline of events, yet sometimes, just sometimes one stumbles upon a golden nugget in the form of an eye witness account from days of yore.

Herewith the translated words of one Franz Mawick, a humble man working with the Swiss ‘Red Cross’ mission as a driver speaking of an event that unfolded before his eyes in Nazi occupied Warsaw back in 1942. His account relates to the seizing…