In 1940, a resistance commander knocked on a door in Haarlem and asked a mother if her two daughters could join the fight against the Nazis. Freddie was 14, Truus was 16. Their mother agreed on…
The man came to the door in Haarlem in 1940, asking for the daughters. Truus was sixteen, Freddie fourteen. He was a commander of the Haarlem Council of Resistance, a man named Frans van der Wiel, and he had noticed the two girls doing small, dangerous things around the city—distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, defacing signs that … Read more
On June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, a car carrying British SOE agent Violette Szabo and French resistance leader Jacques Dufour raced through the French countryside near Limoges. A German…
A car raced through the French countryside near Limoges on the afternoon of June 10th, 1944, four days after the Allies had stormed the beaches of Normandy. Inside sat Violette Szabo, a British SOE agent, and Jacques Dufour, a leader of the local French resistance. They were heading to meet another resistance figure when the … Read more
On 27 September 1944, a C-47 carrying US Army flight nurse Reba Whittle drifted roughly 70 kilometres off course and flew into the flak defences around Aachen, Germany. Shells tore through the…
At 500 feet, the sound of the flak was deafening, and the C-47 was coming apart around them. Reba Whittle woke from a dead sleep to the roar of exploding shells and the sickening sight of blood running down her surgical technician’s left leg. The port engine was on fire. The fuselage was full of … Read more
In 1897, Peter Widener opened Lynnewood Hall, a 110-room limestone palace outside Philadelphia holding Rembrandts and a Vermeer. A butcher’s son turnNaN
In April 1912, George Widener and his son Harry stood on the deck of the Titanic as the ship tilted toward the Atlantic. George had just lifted his wife Eleanor into a lifeboat, telling her he would see her soon. Harry clutched a rare Francis Bacon book he had bought in London. Neither man would … Read more
In 1922, as revolution swept Athens, a British warship was dispatched to evacuate Greece’s disgraced Prince Andrew, his family, and their infant son. Legend says the toddler, Philip, was smuggled…
The gunfire came first. Then the knock. The men at Princess Alice’s door in Athens were Gestapo officers, and they were not paying a social call. Behind them, the machinery of the Holocaust had reached Greece with brutal efficiency: since 1943, the occupiers had been rounding up the country’s Jews for deportation to the camps. … Read more
In July 1889, a small patrol of Buffalo soldiers and a civilian scout rode south from Fort Huachuca into the Sierra Madre, tracking raiders who had killed a ranch hand and left his hat arranged…
Some men carry a story the way other men carry a wound. They walk around it. They dress carefully to hide it. And when a stranger comes to the door, they take a long time answering, because a wound has to be arranged before anyone can see it and not flinch. The man I am … Read more
In July 1994, seven-year-old Megan Kanka vanished while playing near her home in Hamilton, New Jersey. Her mother reported her missing that evening, and a massive search began, with hundreds of…
On July 29, 1994, a neighbor across the street knocked on the Kanka family’s door in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. He offered to help. Jesse Timmendequas, the thirty-three-year-old man who lived in the house directly opposite the Kanka home, said he would circulate flyers. Seven-year-old Megan Kanka had been missing for hours, and the neighborhood … Read more
In April 1945, American soldiers entered Buchenwald and found something they could not explain: a camp whose commandant was already dead, executed days earlier by the SS itself, not for murder but…
Ilsa Koch heard the cell door close behind her on the morning of September 1st, 1967, and made her decision. She was sixty years old, imprisoned in the women’s correctional facility at Aichach in Bavaria, and had spent the better part of two decades inside walls that had become the entire horizon of her existence. … Read more
When Mary I was proclaimed queen on July 19, 1553, Lady Jane Grey’s nine-day reign collapsed. Jane had never been crowned; her authority was contested from the start. Yet Mary did not execute her…
Outside the Tower, London was already celebrating a new queen. Inside, Jane Grey’s father was removing the canopy of state, the cloth of honor that marked his daughter as the ruler of England. According to one account, Jane asked her father to go home. He turned and walked away from her. Her parents left. Guards … Read more
In 1841, in a Comanche camp in what is now the Texas Panhandle, a captured Mexican lancer watched a boy of about five, naked but for a leather cord anNaN
In the autumn of 1841, a captured Mexican lancer sat tied to a post in a Comanche camp in the Texas Panhandle and watched a boy of perhaps five years old. The child was naked except for a leather cord at his waist, his hair bound with strips of buffalo hide, riding bareback on a … Read more