true love never dies ...

  Her favorite place to hide away from the cruel comments and judgment of her parents was the reading nook in her grandparent's house.

  They knew firsthand about forbidden love ... they'd fallen in love while her grandfather was in a concentration camp and her grandmother was the daughter of the camp commander.  It had been love at first sight for both of them, and they did not actually speak to each other until the camp had been liberated.  Had either of them been caught communicating before then, they both would have been killed.

  When the letters and phone calls first began between Elsa and Clarence, her parents brushed it off as a summer romance that would quickly fade away as her university classes began and her attention was distracted by local boys.

  But when it progressed into fall, she was overheard making plans for him to visit at Christmas.  They knew then that this was more than a summer romance and they would need to intervene.  Clarence's letters were intercepted so that she would believe he wasn't writing every day as she was.  Since they couldn't stop her from going to the Postamt to mail her letters to him, they began to intercept his calls to her.  

  With both of them believing that the other was losing interest, soon Elsa and Clarence stopped writing or calling and began to tend to their broken hearts.

  As the years passed, neither of them ever stopped thinking of the other, although they never spoke of each other again.  For Elsa, she focused all of her attention on her schooling, and then on her career as a nurse always thinking of how she could help Clarence care for his mother.  Clarence, on the other hand, focused his attention on his mother, foregoing university to care for her, always thinking of how he was learning to care for Elsa if the time came.

  Theirs was a love that only grew stronger with time.