There seems to be no end to new books, both fiction and non-fiction about the Second World War, and I seem to be reading a lot of them. Almost without exception, they are very powerful, well written, and good reads, and mostly from the point of view of Germany and Germans being the enemy. This novel, written by an American, focuses on the disaster the war brought to the people of Germany. Not the SS or the prison guards or Hitler and his entourage. But the average German man, woman and child, whose lives were destroyed. Millions of people throughout Europe were forced to fleel their homes with few belongings and no one to help them. We don't seem to have much writing from the average German person's point of view, having been conditioned to collectively seem them all as the enemy, and all complicit in Hitler's vision and its enactment. It is refreshing to read another side of the terrible story of this war.
This novel tells the story of a wealthy farming family in the part of Germany that bordered with Poland - East Prussia. The advance of the vengeful Russians in 1944 into Germany, with all their brutality and thirst for revenge, led to a mass exodus west from this area in an attempt to reach the Allied lines before the Russians caught up with them. The author has taken the diary of an East Prussian woman who kept a diary from 1920 to 1945, parts of which documented her family's fleeing and turned it into this story.
Eighteen year old Anna is the story's narrator. With her mother, her younger brother Theo, and a Scottish POW, they flee with as much of their belongings, and food for themselves and their four horses. It is winter, the journey is long, cold, dangerous and terrifying. Parallel to this story is that of a young Jewish man, Uri Singer, who managed to escape from a train taking him and his family to Auschwitz. His story of survival may or may not be true, but what he goes through says a lot for the power of the human spirit. A third story line centers on a group of women who are in a labour camp, and the forced march they undertake across Germany to escape the Russians. An equally horrible story of cruelty, hunger, cold and what it takes to keep on living.
It's a great story, well written, brutal in parts, and heartbreaking. In places not nice to read - the author doesn't beat around the bush with the horrors facing the refugees, the terrible winter cold, the daily fight for survival. But maybe I will leave WWII stories alone for a while, and read more uplifting stuff.
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