FINDING CLARA by Anika Scott

It's great to see novels coming out about the experiences of the average German person during the terrible days of WWII and after. If you take out the borders between all these countries of Europe, then aside from the leadership the peoples weren't really any different from each other, all just trying to survive, feeding themselves and their families. And being about people just like us, such stories make us ask ourselves what we would have done in such 'survival of the fittest' times.

In this novel there are three people, all badly damaged and traumatised by the war years. Clara Falkenburg is the young woman of the title. The book opens in 1946, Clara living under a false name and identity, from those now in charge of Germany - the English, the Americans, and the Russians. She is a wanted woman, having been a poster girl for the German propaganda machine, and supposedly implicit in her father's war crimes. During the war she ran her father's ironworks factory that made munitions for the German army,  employing slave labour to do so, effectively making her guilty too. She is desperate to get back to the town, Essen, where she lived, where the factory was, where her oldest friend and family live. Clara is fearless, scared, dangerous and a risk taker. On Clara's return to Essen, with an English captain on her tail determined to arrest her, she finds everything changed, her town as she knew it gone, along with the people in it who were so dear to her.

Then there is Jakob, recently returned to Essen from the Russian front, where he has lost a leg and everything else. He is desperate to find and look after his own family, and as a black marketeer used to living by his wits, he has plenty of skills and charm to get what he wants.

Lastly there is Willy, a teenage boy, who has spent most of the war holed up in a cave guarding a huge Wehrmacht stash of food and essential supplies. Deeply traumatised by his experiences he has disintegrated into a feral like state, unable to trust anyone or want to rejoin the real world.

With so many people all out for themselves, exhausted, desperate, hungry, cold, trying to survive each day, you would think there would be little room for reaching out, for kindness, for recovery, to find meaning or goodness in daily life. The core of the story is Clara's moral dilemma - her need to resolve within herself whether she was guilty of war crimes or was she not? How much of her idea of caring for the Ukrainian slaves employed in the factory was really about caring? How corrupted had she become by the propaganda whirling around her during her months of running the factory and being held up as the perfect German fräulein? That there is also a bloke as nice and rascally as Jakob and a badly damaged boy in the mix only highlights the moral flaws of all us.

You can see then that the title is not only about the Allies' hunt for Clara, but also about Clara coming to terms with her own war years. This is such a great story, with great characters. I loved them all, so well developed. The town of Essen and how hideous life would have been in post war Germany is also graphically described, not only the physical nature of the place, but the sense of hopelessness, loss and tragedy emanating from the people. Terrible times, and so important that we continue to have great reading coming out of this time in our history.