When the World Turned Upside Down

Author's Note

AN: At this point I feel that I should make some notes about historical accuracy. I'm a history student so accuracy is extremely important to me. This story is heavily researched both medically and historically. I have read Victorian medical texts on spinal injuries and texts chronicling wartime medical practices. All of the locations, other than those created by F.H. Burnett,  are real. For example, King George's Military Hospital where Colin is located existed, and was in fact the largest military hospital in England and was indeed located on Stamford Street in London, although I do not know of any neurologists there treating spinal injuries.  Historical events such as the trench warfare in the first chapter, the bombings of London, and the Kishinev pogrom all happened and were certainly as, or more horrific than I describe here. Real people died in these situations, people who were neither very different than us, or very different from these characters. It is important even a century later, to remember that the numbers we see in history books represent real people, people with lives, and hopes and dreams not unlike our own. For this reason I strive to stray as little as possible from the facts of the events I depict here, I do not need to embellish their horror or make up events to fill space for these events demand accuracy in their retelling. Even the description of the child killed in the Kishinev pogrom is accurate, several children, their names lost to history, including an unnamed twelve year old girl were killed in the 1903 pogrom. Fifty people were killed in the 1903 pogrom and over 500 were wounded. After the October Manifesto in 1905, 19 more Jews were murdered, and over 50 were injured in a second pogrom, these spurred mass immigration. The story depicted here is as accurate as I can possibly make it, although precise facts about where the bombs fell during the day of July 7, 1917 are hard to pinpoint, though most fell on the East End, and thus terrorized the poorest and most desperate Londoners. What I can tell you is that the bombing took the lives of 57 people and injured nearly 200 others. And that when Gotha bombers broke through the bright summer sky on that lazy Saturday, a young man did the most human and yet the most heroic thing in the world. He didn't run away from the flames, but towards them. I have placed Rutka's brother Chaim in the place of a young office clerk, who witnessed the bombing, and later wrote:
"{there was} a blinding flash, a chaos of breaking glass, and the air thick-yellow dust and fumes. Five men had been struck by bomb fragments and a boy of my own age, also hit, died in the afternoon. Outside was a terrible sight, the horses twisted and mangled...the front of the office next door, which had caught the full force, blown clean away.  They brought into our building people from the ruins there and I helped to carry them – it was a relief to do something. All the unfortunates had ghastly wounds. I had never seen a dead man before and I was too dazed to realise until afterwards that they must have been stone dead. A fireman, with his axe, put the last horse out of its anguish. The curious thing is that I did not hear the bomb at all and yet I was quite deaf for three days."
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