First Lines Friday – 23rd July 2021

It’s Friday!!!! That means it’s time for my first “First Lines Fridays”!!!

For those of you who are new to to this, First Lines Fridays is a weekly meme, that I first saw on Jill’s Book Blog and which is originally hosted by Wondering Words.

Rules:

Choose a book from your shelves/current read
Open the book to the first page
Copy the first line on the page, making sure you don’t give away the book title
Reveal the book.

FIRST LINES:

“Trucks rumble to a stop outside. Shouts and gun shots follow. The building caretaker bangs on the door.
“The Germans are here,” he shouts. “Hide in the basement or get out through the gardens at the back.“

Do you recognise which book these lines come from?

This weeks book is…

Synopsis/Blurb (Taken from Goodreads):

“How do you keep fighting in the face of unimaginable horror?

This is untold story of one of the greatest heroes of the Second World War.

In the Summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interred at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich.

His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre — Auschwitz.

It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazi’s terrifying designs. Over the next two and half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities out of Auschwitz. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust – yet his story was all but forgotten for decades.

This is the first major account of his amazing journey, drawing on exclusive family papers and recently declassified files as well as unpublished accounts from the camp’s fighters to show how he saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

The result is a enthralling story of resistance and heroism against the most horrific circumstances, and one man’s attempt to change the course of history.”