The Last Constellation Over Auschwitz

September 1, 1939: Poland is thrust into the crucible of history when Germany defies borders and sweeps a ferocious and bloody path through this hapless nation. Nineteen-year-old Lukas Stein, a Hitler Youth, discovers that he is a Jew just before he’s sent to rid Poland of its ‘sub-humans’. Zofie Altman and her family in the town of Płock are the first he’s expected to exterminate. He and his fellow Nazis burst into their home on the morning of her eighteenth birthday, announcing that people of their race are no longer allowed to exist in this world.

Despite being indoctrinated by his years in the movement, Lukas is nevertheless turned inside out that day, struggling with the revelation that his mother was secretly Jewish, something that was hidden from him until now. Conflicted by that and the orders he’s sworn to obey, Lukas refuses to kill Zofie and abandons everything he’s been forced to believe in. This once fervent cadet becomes a deserter, and Wehrmacht deserters aren’t allowed to exist in this world either.

Lukas and Zofie spend the next few months fighting for survival in an altered reality that sees them hiding in clammy hollows, running from strangers in frozen forests, and keeping Lukas’s Nazi secret from the partisans who take them in. In time, they learn to trust each other as they are forced to rely on each other to survive. Slowly, they come to like each other, and then – impossibly - they fall in love.

Zofie’s talisman, and the one thing she was able to hang onto, was a journal whose cover depicts the constellations –a subject that fascinated her since her grandfather first taught her about the stars. Now a book of remembrance, it is passed from one victim of the Nazis to the next, each one filling its pages with tales of their own tragedies. Zofie had dreamed of becoming an astronomer, mapping the stars, but the only stars she now collects are the ones she plucks from the clothes of the murdered on her ill-starred odyssey, forming her own macabre constellation.

After a year of surviving impossible odds, Lukas is captured. At first, he’s honoured as a hero but when his lie is revealed he is sent to Dachau and then Auschwitz as a novelty: half guard, half prisoner, half-Jew, half German. In the camps, he becomes a target for guards and inmates alike - hated for being German, punished for deserting, and brutalised for being a Jew. His kindness eventually endears him to some of the prisoners who remind him of humanity.

Zofie eventually finds refuge in the Łódź ghetto where she gives birth to their child, a boy she names Dominik. A few days later her part of the ghetto is liquidated and she is torn from her newborn and deported to Auschwitz.

It is there that Lukas is forced to do unspeakable tasks including clearing out the gas chambers. He is only jolted back to reality when he’s ordered to stand on the selection ramp and help decide the fates of the unhappy souls disembarking from crowded cattle wagons. There, at the gates of Hell, he spots a familiar figure - Zofie, who wanted to spend her life unravelling the beauty of the universe but is now sinking into its foulest void.

Lukas, desperate to save her, surrenders all. He cannot bring himself to send her to the right, to death. Inspired by her spirit, enthralled by her goodness, he decides to defy his commanders and do all he can to save her, even if it means they may die in each other’s arms….