The historical world of Empyrean
Liberation Merely the Beginning of Another Conflict
Allied soldiers entered the camps and found prisoners dying of starvation, disease, and exposure. Survivors needed food, medicine, shelter, and news of their families. The soldiers who had reached them now had to keep them alive.
In the spring of 1945, American, British, and Soviet forces liberated concentration camps across Europe. Soldiers encountered prisoners too weak to walk, crowded barracks, and unburied bodies. Medical personnel began treating survivors while other troops continued the campaign. Empyrean takes place during these final months of war.
Allied soldiers enter the camps
Soldiers arriving at a camp had to secure the grounds and find anyone in need of immediate treatment. They needed interpreters to speak with prisoners, guards to hold captured SS personnel, and transport for food and medicine. Doctors and nurses treated people weakened by years of abuse. Some survivors died after the arrival of Allied troops, despite the care they received.
Prisoners forced to work for their captors
SS authorities assigned prisoners to work details and punished those who resisted. Some assignments gave prisoners access to food or shelter; others exhausted or killed them. A prisoner deciding whether to comply had to consider what a guard could do to him or to someone he loved. Ionel’s work under Burg takes place within that dependence on a captor’s decisions.
Finding relatives and a place to live
Many survivors had lost their homes and had no news of their relatives. They searched names in newspapers and at tracing bureaus, listened to broadcasts, and asked people arriving from other camps. In displaced-persons camps, they established schools, held religious services, married, and raised children while seeking permission to settle in other countries.
Documenting Nazi crimes
Survivors described what had happened to them. Soldiers and photographers documented the condition of the camps. Investigators gathered medical charts, transport lists, correspondence, and other documents that identified perpetrators and their actions. They used these materials in postwar prosecutions and preserved them for historians and the families of victims.
The Captain’s assignment in Empyrean
The Captain arrives with a wound that has barely healed and men who expect him to know what to do. Sabina tends the sick. Pierson hears survivors and speaks to the officers responsible for their care. Lindley controls supplies and insists that his orders be followed. Within the fictional Operation Mercy Torch, these four must decide how to care for people whose survival depends on their next actions.
A novel by R. William Chapman II