Black Cross

When a young Atlanta physician attends the funeral of the grandparents who raised him, he is approached by a silver-haired rabbi who claims to have known his grandfather well. Returning together to the family home, they open his grandfather's safe. There they discover four mysterious objects - the relics of a man haunted by something he did one winter night in 1944 - an act that brought him unparalleled honors, but left wounds in his soul that would never heal. As the story of these secret souvenirs unfolds, the grandson's concept of honor is stretched to the breaking point and his notion of heroism redefined forever. In January 1944, four people held the fate of the world in their hands. They were not statesmen or generals, but an American doctor, a German nurse, a Zionist killer, and a young Jewish widow. At the command of Winston Churchill, these four strangers are brought together in a place almost beyond imagination. It is a small SS-run concentration camp serving as the incubator for a weapon of staggering lethality - a weapon U.S. General Omar Bradley later admitted could have wiped out the D-day invasion force on Omaha Beach. What they are forced to do in the name of victory - and survival - demonstrates with terrible clarity that in a world where all is at stake, war has no rules.