The Amber Crane by Malve von Hassell

The Amber Crane

by Malve von Hassell

(Time-slip historical fiction, YA)

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Chafing at the rules of the amber guild, Peter, an apprentice during the waning years of the Thirty Years’ War, finds and keeps a forbidden piece of amber, despite the risk of severe penalties should his secret be discovered.

Little does he know that this amber has hidden powers, transporting him into a future far beyond anything he could imagine. In dreamlike encounters, Peter witnesses the ravages of the final months of World War II in and around his home. He becomes embroiled in the troubles faced by Lioba, a girl he meets who seeks to escape from the oncoming Russian army.

Peter struggles with the consequences of his actions, endangering his family, his amber master’s reputation, and his own future. How much is Peter prepared to sacrifice to right his wrongs?

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A Word from the Author

This time-slip historical fiction book tells the story of Peter, a 17th century amber guild apprentice in Pomerania, Germany. It was inspired by three central themes.

One was a fascination since my childhood with amber, a gemstone full of mystery and power. Amber has been much valued as a gemstone from antiquity to the present. In the Baltic regions it was referred to as “Baltic gold.” Another name for it was Tears of the Gods, derived from several myths about the origins of this remarkable stone that continues to inspire the imagination.

The second is a personal connection to the region and setting of the book. My mother was born in Pomerania and told me many stories about her childhood home and the land where her ancestors had lived since the 1300s. I also was fortunate enough to be able to visit this beautiful land with my mother in 1994, over fifty years since she had last seen it. It was a surreal journey into the past and a remarkable experience of having her stories come to life.

The third inspiration is based on my learning about the history of my country from teachers, my reading, and my family. It is not an easy history to absorb for a young person, and at times as a child I couldn’t help but blur the distinctions between the various devastating wars that swept over the land. The story of my mother’s family is inextricably bound up with the Thirty Years’ War, which impacted Pomerania almost more than any other region in Europe, World War I, and World War II, with many members of my maternal family swallowed up in these maelstroms. World War II, in particular, impacted my mother’s family in that they together with many others had to endure a hurried evacuation from their home and accept that they would never be able to return.

These three strands of inspiration became the basis for the story of Peter. I hit upon the notion of writing a reverse time-slip story, trying to imagine what it would be like for someone from the past to be pushed into a future time, utterly alienating and confounding and at the same time also remarkably familiar. Peter knows perfectly well what it was like to live in a land devastated by war, hunger, desperation, greed, and cruelty. The trappings of modernity, from electricity to telephones, cars, and airborne weapons of war, are fascinating. Meanwhile, catching glimpses of the horrors of World War II, with brief insights into the Holocaust as well as the experience of millions of people seeking to escape from an oncoming army, might well prove too much for Peter to bear.

As a curious living testament to the linkage of past and future, there is a tree near my mother’s childhood home that was planted on a hill about 20 miles from the coastline of the Baltic Sea almost 100 years before the birth of my 17^th century protagonist Peter. That tree was called the Schifferlinde (mariners’ linden tree). According to the von Zitzewitz chronicle, a member of the family lit a glowing fire next to the tree on stormy and dark nights. The fishermen rewarded him with salt and herrings. Given its exposed location and size, the tree was marked on the nautical charts as a guide.

In 1931, the tree was declared a protected natural monument of the Stolp district.

It is still standing even though about half of the branches were lost when the tree was hit by lightning during a storm in the 1980s.

(Malve von Hassell, 2021)