Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in 20th Century

Two sisters are brutally separated by war in tragic circumstances. Ania is imprisoned and forced to endure the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp. Danuta’s search for her sister leads her into the dangers of the Polish Underground. Each will do what they must to survive long enough to find each other. Their dream of being reunited is crushed in shocking circumstances. In an astonishing twist of fate, the opportunity for revenge presents itself 60 years later.

Peter Blunden, a New Zealand soldier captured in Crete, jumps from a train and escapes from his Nazi captors. He is taken into a safe house by Mrs. Tasoula, a dressmaker and a member of the Greek resistance movement. She employs several young dressmakers including Thalia Christidou, who wonders why the door to a room off the living room is always locked. This arrangement works well for some time, but the Germans are everywhere and there is mounting concern that the men will be discovered. Thalia sees them by accident, and soon Peter and Thalia become close.

Tasmania, 1874. Growing up in the impoverished tenements along the Hobart Rivulet, Harriet Brown is used to doing whatever it takes to survive. Including, at just twelve years old, shearing off her hair and pretending to be a boy to secure a job as label-paster at the George Peacock and Sons jam factory. Four years later, the deceit becomes too much to bear and Harriet risks everything on the chance at a future with her ambitious friend and workmate Henry Jones. But this decision forces her into a new deception: play the role of expert jam maker, or else be cast out onto the streets.

In 1940, as the Nazis sweep toward Lithuania, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara defies his own government and secretly issues thousands of visas to Jewish refugees desperate to flee. After the war, Sugihara is dismissed and disappears into obscurity. Three decades later, in Australia, Rachael Margolin, her father and her grandmother live disconnected from one another and haunted by unspoken tragedies. When Rachel announces her engagement to a Greek Orthodox man, it detonates a long-held secret.

When Sofie comes to stay with her grandmother in Stanthorpe, she knows little of Nonna Gia's past. In the heat of that 1984 summer, the two clash over Gia's strict Italian ways and superstitions, her chilli-laden spaghetti and the evasive silence surrounding Sofie's father, who died before she was born. Then Sofie learns Gia had an arranged marriage. From there, the past begins to reveal why no-one will talk of her father.

Prague, 1943. Taken from her home in Prague, Hana Lederova finds herself imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt, where she is forced to endure appalling deprivation and the imminent threat of transportation to the east. When she attracts the attention of the Czech gendarme who becomes her guard, Hana reluctantly accepts his advances, hoping for the protection she so desperately needs. Sydney, 2010. Manipulated into a liaison with her married boss, Tessa knows she needs to end it, but how?

Nazi Germany has been crushed, but is the war really over? Klara, Hitler's personal cook, swears she glimpsed him fleeing the Berlin bunker via a secret tunnel. The world needs undeniable proof of the Fuhrer's death, but it's not that simple. While Allied intelligence agents scour Europe to find such proof, and a Hitler double—"the Wolf"—lays a false trail across two continents, the real Hitler hides out in a Polish monastery, desperate to find his gold train so he can fund the Fourth Reich.

August, 1944. In German-occupied Paris, former schoolteacher Auguste Duchene has stumbled upon an unusual way to survive: he finds missing people. When he’s approached by members of the French Resistance to locate a missing priest - and a cache of stolen weapons - Duchene initially refuses. But the Resistance offer him no choice. Within hours, he’s also blackmailed by a powerful Nazi into searching for a German soldier who’s suspected of deserting.

1938, as the world spirals towards war, Klara Koch is employed as Hitler's personal cook. While Germany reveres the image of the Fuhrer, Klara and the household staff are privy to the real Hitler—his secrets, his ailments and his addictions. As Klara observes those circling the Fuhrer, she realises that not all of them are his admirers. Hitler is right to be paranoid. This thoroughly researched and compelling story takes listeners right up close and personal with Hitler as he spirals increasingly out of control in pursuit of his drug-fuelled quest for world domination.

A small garrison of Australian soldiers is left to defend a town and its people against the might of the Japanese forces. This is a story of those who were left behind and those who waited for them to return.

Shortly before the Japanese invade, the van Hoorn family throws their famous Sinterklaas party at their tea plantation in West Java. One of their guests, Mattijs, a Dutch pilot, hopes to forge a future in the Dutch East Indies, possibly with the family's daughter Anna, but she is torn between her dreams of Holland and her desire to belong. Meanwhile the housekeeper, Diah, keenly observes the goings-on around the plantation, wondering how much to tell her freedom-fighter brother.

Europe, 1940s: Imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Spanish fighter and photographer Mateo Baca is ordered to process images of the camp and inmates for a handful of photo books being made for presentation to top Nazi figures. Just five books in total, or so the officials think. Mateo manages to make a secret sixth book and, with the help of a local woman, Lena Lang, it remains hidden until the end of the war.

In the summer of 1912, a workman's pickaxe strikes through the basement floor of an old tenement house in Cheapside, London, uncovering a cache of unimaginably valuable treasure that quickly disappears again. Present day. When respected jewellery historian Kate Kirby receives a call about the Cheapside jewels, she knows she's on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. As Kate peels back the layers of London's stories of plague, fire and political turmoil, she is forced to explore long-buried family secrets.

Paris, 1938. The last sigh of summer before the war. As Australian journalist Charlotte ‘Charlie' James alights at the Gare du Nord, ready to start her role as correspondent for The Times, Paris is in turmoil as talk of war becomes increasingly strident. Charlie is chasing her first big scoop, needing to prove to her boss that she can do this job as well as, if not better than, her male counterparts. And the best way to forge the necessary contacts quickly is to make the well-connected expats, Lord and Lady Ashworth, her business.

In 1916, Rosie Marchand leaves her hometown of Albert on the Somme. A survivor of the war, she finds shelter in the home of her cousin, photographer Louis Thuillier, a shell-shocked veteran of Verdun, who with his wife Antoinette takes pictures of soldiers behind the lines. For Australian Bill Foster, the war is a faraway adventure where he is driven to go and join his brother. Bill is in love with Isabella De Luca, a passionate Queensland woman, and promises to return to her. However, Mick De Luca, Isabella's father, vows to do all he can to ensure this doesn't happen.

London, 1943: war and dwindling resources are taking their toll on the staff of Partridge Press. The pressure is on to create new books to distract readers from the grim realities of the war, but Partridge's rising star, Alice Cotton, leaves abruptly and cannot be found. Alice's secret absence is to give birth, and although her baby's father remains unnamed, Alice's mother promises to help her raise her tiny granddaughter, Eadie. Instead, she takes a shocking action. Theo Bloom is employed by the American office of Partridge.

July, 1945. The war in Europe is finally over. But Auguste Duchene, who survived occupied Paris at great personal cost, cannot escape his past. He finds himself helping the Allies to pursue a Gestapo war criminal through the ravaged and dangerous streets of Berlin. Duchene soon learns, however, that, although one global conflict may have ended, another is beginning, and he is in a deadly race against the Russians as they hunt the same man. And, once again, at the heart of all he does, are his extraordinary wife Sabine and his beloved daughter Marienne.