Kris Draven

Kris Draven aspires to be a storyteller who explores the unexplored, regardless of the genre. Growing up in an oppressed communist society in Eastern Europe, Draven was drawn to the stories told by elders while also developing a vivid imagination of what the world could be. Inspired by a seventh-grade language teacher, Draven hopes to give readers stories that transport them away to different worlds and quicken their heartbeats with thrilling delight.

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Anna’s Medallion

Third Reich, 1941

Can love survive the depths of hell?

In Nazi-occupied Poland, Anna, a freedom fighter, and Filip, a poor farmhand, are torn from their families and transported to Germany.

Enslaved on two nearby farms, they endure brutal labor, relentless abuse, and violent reprisals—yet in the midst of suffering, they find an undeniable love.

When they revolt against their depraved masters, they are banished to two separate concentration camps—Buchenwald and Ravensbrück.

Bound only by their love and a promise medallion, they must survive unspeakable cruelty at the hands of sadistic SS officers who make the camps a living nightmare.

Will Anna and Filip escape the apocalyptic Germany as the war rages around them, or will their love be doomed forever?

ANNA’S MEDALLION is a gripping tale of resilience and hope inspired by a true love story.

Get your copy on Amazon: https://a.co/d/fsQuPaL If you enjoy the book, I would appreciate if you could provide a review on Amazon so we can spread the message about the horrors of slavery to more people.

Inspiration

Inspiration behind “Anna’s Medallion”

The history of forced labor in Nazi Germany is well-recorded but often forgotten.

Following the German invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Soviet Union, the Nazis quickly began forcibly transporting POWs and civilians of those countries to Germany. Once there, the forced laborers were distributed to farms, construction sites, and factories to work without pay and under threat of imprisonment.

Many of the laborers were housed in concentration camps with attached armament factories operated by such firms as IG Farben, Krupp, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Hugo Boss, Mittelwerk GmbH, Gustloff-Werke, and many others. Altogether, approximately 12 million slaves worked in Germany during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. More than half of them perished from exhaustion, malnutrition, disease, hard labor, and Nazi extermination. These men and women came from all over Europe: 3 million from the Soviet Union, 2 million from Poland, 1 million from France, and the rest from seventeen other countries of Europe.

There were twenty concentration camps in Nazi Germany and approximately 1,200 sub-camps. In all the camps, the Nazis’ goal was to extract as much wealth and labor out of the prisoners before killing them in gas chambers or through harsh working conditions.

Some of the camps served primarily as extermination camps, while others were labor camps designed to support the Nazi war machine. While it’s extremely difficult to estimate the total population of the concentration camps due to many records being destroyed just prior to the liberation by the Allied forces, somewhere between 15 and 20 million people were imprisoned in the camps, and 11 to 17 million perished there (including 6 to 7 million Jews).

One of the biggest and most brutal labor camps in Germany was at Buchenwald. During its operation, from 1937 to 1945, Buchenwald concentration camp held approximately 239,000 prisoners from various nationalities, including Jews, but also political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, and others deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime. It is estimated that at least 35,000 prisoners died in Buchenwald due to harsh conditions, forced labor, medical experiments, executions, and other forms of mistreatment, including starvation and lack of disease control.

While the camp held only 2,900 prisoners initially—mostly communists opposed to the Nazi regime—the population exploded to over 98,000 in the last full year of operation. While Allied forces advanced and the war situation deteriorated for Nazi Germany, Buchenwald’s population surged as prisoners were evacuated from other camps and moved to Buchenwald. Conditions worsened drastically, leading to a high death toll among the inmates.

The biggest labor camp for women—which was just as brutal—was at Ravensbrück. Approximately 132,000 women and children were registered as prisoners throughout its existence, from 1939 to 1945. Around 30,000 to 50,000 prisoners died in Ravensbrück due to various causes. The camp was initially built to incarcerate political prisoners, but it later expanded to include women from multiple backgrounds deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime. This included Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, resistance fighters, socialists, communists, and women labeled as asocial or criminal (mostly prostitutes and lesbians).

The living conditions for the slave laborers in the camps and elsewhere throughout Germany were extremely harsh. Overcrowding, inadequate food, and constant abuse by the SS guards and ordinary Germans who found themselves as slave masters were daily realities. The laborers were treated like scum and discarded like used parts if they underperformed. However, despite all their suffering, some of them found a way to survive.

A few even found love.

Inspired by my grandparents’ true love story

I loved my grandparents very much and always wanted to write a story about how they fell in love while working as slave laborers in Nazi Germany based on the bits and pieces I heard growing up from my grandfather. The story intrigued me because I read very little about slave labor in the volumes of information about World War II I inhaled over the years, and I thought people should know more about the enormity of the suffering and death it caused.

However, my grandparents never wanted to speak about what happened to them. My grandmother refused completely; she didn’t even discuss it with her children. Then, only a few years before his passing, my grandfather finally agreed to talk about what happened to him and allowed me to record it. The few hours of video recordings I acquired convinced me this story had to be told to the world. Then, the more I researched slavery and concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the more I realized this book needed to pay respect to and acknowledge not just my grandparents’ story but also the stories of other, mostly ordinary, people who went through it on both sides of the conflict. Therefore, I expanded the story to include real events and people of the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps that my grandparents probably were never part of or met but could have.

The real Anna and her medallion

My grandmother was a beautiful, stoic woman. She was a great cook and took care of her family as if her life depended on it. You could always count on her. At the same time, it always felt as though she carried a heavy burden on her shoulders. She spoke very little, and her face was almost always very serious. I assumed it was due to the difficulties of living in communist Poland, where we often had to stand in long lines just to obtain bread and milk, while everything else was scarce and could only be found on the black market at very high prices. Only later did I find out about what she went through during the war.

While not all details are clear, we know that together with her three sisters, she was sent by force to Germany to work as a slave laborer. Additionally, according to the International Tracing Service (ITS), it was confirmed that she was registered on February 12, 1941, in the village of Immenrode, in the rural district of Nordhausen. She also appears on a list of persons wanted by the Weimar police on December 3, 1941, with the remark: “arrest.” Whether she was, in fact, arrested and where she was incarcerated remains a mystery, but she didn’t arrive back in Poland until 1945, so she somehow remained in Germany for another three and a half years. She met my grandfather in her village sometime during her five years in Germany, but the exact date is unclear. I used Ravensbrück as her place of incarceration because it was the largest prison for women, and the Nazis destroyed all documentation before abandoning it, which could explain why the ITS had no further information about my grandmother’s stay in Germany.