When the world broke

They had never met. They were born thousands of miles apart. Yet the catastrophic machinery of World War II was already driving them toward an unexpected, life-altering collision. In the historic hill town of Urbino in Fascist Italy, María Baldeschi risked the firing squad by sheltering her hunted Jewish friend beneath the rafters of her family home as racial laws and SS roundups tightened around them. Across the continent in Poland, Edward Nabozny, an elite border guard defending his nation's eastern frontier, was captured by invading Soviet forces, endured the subzero starvation of the Gulag, and undertook an epic journey of survival to rejoin the Allied war effort with the Polish II Corps-spearheading assaults across the sands of North Africa and the bloody slopes of Monte Cassino. Their separate odysseys traversed hunger, mortal terror, displacement, and irreparable loss-from Arctic logging camps and the siege of Tobruk to the ruined Benedictine abbey of central Italy. They had no reason to believe their lives would ever touch. Yet total war drove them into the identical Italian hall. Drawn from intimate family testimony, private letters, and exhaustive historical docu mentation, When the World Broke chronicles the extraordinary true story of two young survivors whose paths finally crossed in a devastated, liberated Italy-and who proved that amidst the wreckage of civilization, the human spirit retained the power to trust, to love, and to build a future. Their legacy would span three continents, journeying from the battlefields of Europe to the peace of Argentina and the United States-forging a family shaped by war, but never conquered by it. A timeless saga of courage, clandestine resistance, exile, and the indomitable capacity of the human heart to begin again