The Twilight of Courage

In The Twilight of Courage, the husband-and-wife team of Brock and Bodie Thoene explore the interplay of political events in Europe at the start of World War II as they imprinted themselves upon the lives of the novel’s principal characters and how the frayed moral fabric of the time brought people to personal crises just as it brought the continent to war. The novel begins with Rabbi Lebowitz, in Jerusalem, praying for the safety of his granddaughter, Etta Lubetkin, and her family in Warsaw, Poland. Rabbi Lebowitz’s granddaughter, Etta, her husband, Aaron Lubetkin, and their children—the smallest of whom is the infant Yacov—have been arrested for trying to leave Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto without permission. They are taken captive by the Nazis to be incarcerated. Etta is able to hide Yacov with a Christian Polish woman just before the Lubetkin family is herded aboard a train for the slave camps.