Quotes from Jane Thynne

Perhaps, he thought, there was some strange satisfaction to be derived from confining savage animals here, given that the savagery outside this place was the kind that couldn't be confined.

She had never felt so alone or frightened in her life. She had come to Berlin to feel closer to her mother, and had found instead danger and death.

passing bars belching beer breath through open doors

SHE WALKED DOWN THE great stuccoed apartment blocks of the Kurfürstendamm, now decorated with antiaircraft guns pointing into the porcelain-blue sky.

All the dangerous glamour had been swept up by the broom of National Socialism,

Anyone of their age had already spent years in the Hitler Youth being trained to ridicule, taunt, and bully,

Führer Kontakt it was called, an intense magnetic hold that made the person with him believe, just for that moment, that he or she was the only one in the room. A hypnotic force that dazzled, empowered, and enslaved.

As she sucked on her cherry bonbon, her tongue found the ridge of the swastika on the fruitdrop's sugar coat, the sourness beneath the sweet, and the image of grandmother came to her, with her gentle eyes and her bagful of Gummi bears and marzipan pigs.

It's incredible how enormous actions can turn on the whim of a single man.

She pictured the diaphanous wings of flies glittering like cut coal in the air above her friend's body.

She could feel the emotion in the place pressing up against the walls, all eyes alert, hearts beating as one, the sense that everyone there was part of something bigger than themselves. That was a powerful emotion. It was the emotion that the Third Reich relied on. It was the kind of emotion that could move mountains.

Even the famously unsporty Hitler liked to carry a riding whip in his hand.