Die Bäckerei is a tale of rare courage and resistance in Hitler's Germany and a prologue in many respects to our 21st century stories. The arc of this fast-paced adventure follows a reluctant hero from his origins in the Armenian Genocide in 1918, to the horror of life in Berlin during the 1940’s and finally to the tragedy at America’s southern border in the recent past. The story was inspired by two of my heroes in the German Resistance, who also appear in the book. The first is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the brilliant theologian, whose somewhat complex theology of resistance made acting to confront tyranny a matter of Christian faith, a conclusion he did not come to easily. He was hung with piano wire at Flossenbürg concentration camp on the direct order of Hitler a week before it was liberated by the Allies. Less renowned but no less courageous is Erika von Brockdorff, the young mother and pamphleteer who was guillotined at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin at age 32. I spent time with her daughter Saskia, age 84, a few years ago in Berlin, which was an experience that galvanized my desire to write the book. Erika was able to smuggle a letter written to Saskia then four years old out of prison shortly before she was murdered. It was not until Saskia was a young woman in her twenties that she saw that letter, which had been withheld by her father who had fought for Germany. Until then, Saskia had assumed that Erika had abandoned her during the war.