The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Ten British POWs in German-occupied Poland decide to help a young Jewish woman escape the SS and a death march to the sea.
As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, the Germans began emptying their concentration camps by ‘death marches’, gruelling, roundabout (dodging the Allied advance) journeys on foot to the Baltic shores, where the SS forced their captives into the sea and gunned them down. But one young woman escaped, with the help of ten British prisoners-of-war.
After more than a month in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, Moses finds that the Israelites are growing rebellious.
The Israelites have at last escaped slavery in Egypt, but now another test lies before them: the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. The food and flocks they have brought out with them cannot sustain them for ever, especially if they have no water.
Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with a constitution for a holy nation, to find it already broken.
The Israelites have tired of waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, and have made themselves a golden calf for a god in place of the God of Moses. But Moses now has returned, bearing two stone tablets inscribed with a law for his people, and he is not pleased to see it has been broken already.
Since the Israelites could not bear seeing Moses go to the mountain, the God upon the mountain came down to the Israelites.
Moses’s long absences on Mount Sinai are putting too great a strain on the Israelites, so instead of demanding that Moses come to the mountain, God comes down to Moses, meeting him in a makeshift temple at the mountain’s foot.
Spies are sent out to scout the Promised Land, but their report shows that Israel is not yet ready to inherit it.
After fleeing slavery in Egypt, the Israelites have been living in the empty wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. On Mount Sinai itself, God has met with their leader Moses and given his people a law to live by and a promise of a land of their own. In the meantime, however, life in the desert is punishingly hard.
Moses is allowed to look upon the Promised Land for the first and last time.
Moses has brought the Israelites to the very borders of Canaan, the land promised to them by God, but with their prize in sight the Israelites have fallen prey to doubt, disconcerted by the Canaanites’ fortresses and warriors. For that, all Israel has been forced to wait even longer in the wilderness.