Harvesting a storm
Author: Dimitrij Grčar
Published by: Olympia Publishers (2025)
A fierce journalist.
A collapsing regime.
A city seconds from erasure.
Harvesting a Storm brings readers into the final days before the bombing of Belgrade in April 1941 — a moment in history that derailed Hitler’s war plans, triggered by a people’s uprising and a single woman’s words.
Zora, a plucky freelance journalist, lives on the edge of danger in a city governed by fear, betrayal, and secrecy. With nothing but her pen, a pressroom upstairs, and a deep sense of duty, she fights back — through her writing, through her network, and through one devastating truth too powerful to be ignored.
This is not just a novel about war.
It’s a novel about resistance before it has a name.
I Am Zora ...
"I’m forty years old.
Not young enough to be dismissed, not old enough to be forgotten.
I have no husband. No children.
There was once a man who believed in truth as fiercely as I do...
He disappeared the same week his letters stopped arriving.
So now, there’s just me.
My typewriter.
And the stories I can’t not write."
"I am not brave.
But I’ve run out of ways to stay silent."
Historical Echoes
- Belgrade’s uprising against Nazi alignment (March 27, 1941)
- Operation Retribution: the bombing of Belgrade (April 6, 1941)
- Censorship and state propaganda in pre-invasion Yugoslavia
- Underground journalism and resistance networks across Europe
- The cost of dissent under fascist rule
Themes
- Resistance through language: Journalism as rebellion
- Women at war: Invisible, underestimated, indispensable
- Propaganda vs. truth: The struggle to publish what matters
- Personal courage: How ordinary people trigger history
- Moral action under occupation: When silence becomes betrayal
EXCERPT OF THE BOOK
One woman. One article. One city poised to explode.
Based on the true and tragic events of April 1941, Harvesting a Storm drops readers into the tense final days before the Nazi bombing of Belgrade — an attack ordered in fury, not strategy, and one that would go on to derail Hitler’s carefully laid invasion of the Soviet Union.
At the heart of this chaos is an unforgettable protagonist: a plucky freelance journalist whose typewriter is as sharp as her defiance. Fearless and dangerously persistent, she inhabits a world of espionage, betrayal, blackmail, and political corruption, navigating shadowy alliances and a fractured kingdom on the brink of collapse.
When Yugoslavia’s government signs a pact with Hitler and the military stages a coup, the public floods the streets in defiant protest. But behind this uprising is more than a spontaneous surge of patriotism — it's the result of relentless work by a woman determined to expose high treason through her network of collaborators and the relentless force of the printed word.
As the city quivers with unrest, Hitler — enraged by the rebellion — retaliates with a brutal aerial assault. The bombing of Belgrade, code-named “Operation Punishment,” becomes a catastrophic pivot in WWII, triggered in part by one woman's voice echoing through a kingdom without unity.
Bold, cinematic, and emotionally gripping, Harvesting a Storm is a masterfully crafted political thriller grounded in real history. It’s a story about what it means to speak truth in dangerous times — and how a single life, when fiercely lived, can alter the course of the world.