The Journey – Prologue to Hell

By Audrey Hooker

The Journey – Prologue to Hell is indeed what the book’s title tells all its readers. It gives exactly the train passengers’ experience to those who’d been gathered up from their homes to be transported on it. To what, those passengers had wondered. Given false knowledge of a wonderful life they were being taken to by Nazis who’d dragged them out onto the road into waiting lorries then onto a train, they soon found that was false. They discovered the train journey didn’t lie, though; it showed its passengers the truth long before it ended.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398429307

Audrey Hooker

Audrey Hooker was born in Liverpool where she was educated and then worked in a bank there. She later moved to London, where she was able, having kept up her writing whenever possible, to be a journalist for a trade and technical magazines publisher for eight years until she married, and set up a small printing company from knowledge gained through writing on printing. She ran the company until she retired, and then set about writing fiction.

Book preview

The Journey –

Prologue to Hell

Audrey Hooker

Austin Macauley Publishers

The Journey –

Prologue to Hell

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

About the Author

Audrey Hooker was born in Liverpool where she was educated and then worked in a bank there. She later moved to London, where she was able, having kept up her writing whenever possible, to be a journalist for a trade and technical magazines publisher for eight years until she married, and set up a small printing company from knowledge gained through writing on printing. She ran the company until she retired, and then set about writing fiction.

Dedication

To Linda, my mentor, and Pat, my supporter. And to many friends who’ve spurred me on – my grateful thanks to all.

Copyright Information ©

Audrey Hooker 2022

The right of Audrey Hooker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398429284 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398429291 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398429307 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

AARON sat in his home kitchen, oh so familiar to him, his packed suitcase by his side. Comforted by the safe atmosphere of known things around him, he ticked off in his mind what he’d put in the suitcase. Items a 17-year-old art student would need away from home; instruction book, crayons, chalks, sketch pads, pencil sharpeners; he’d scattered among the packed laundry his mother had set out for him to take.

Perhaps it would also comfort Isaac if he sat here, Aaron quietly wondered, as he heard his childhood friend’s tearful voice coming from another room. Aaron knew the other families who, like them, had rented rooms in the large Berlin building they’d all shared, strongly agreed with how his own parents felt, which was: Why should anyone be forced to leave their homes?

Aaron, in despair because that was what everyone, himself included, was now doing, that very day, leaving home on the order of Herr Hitler. He angrily shook his straight black hair, which made his cap fly off his head. He scrabbled around, found the missing hat, firmly set it back in its place, and then somehow knew the inexorable time had come for him to join other family members in the building’s communal hallway. Then wait for the promised transport.

The strong reluctance he’d felt at having to join all the other home leavers grouped together in the