THE VANISHING SKY by L. Annette Binder

 

You know what, I wish that the leaders of countries who want to wage war on each other, would just lock themselves up in a room somewhere and just sort it out, instead of involving millions and millions of ordinary and blameless people in their power games. Because the war is never fought in the leaders' dens, bunkers, high rise buildings, flash offices. It is fought and felt out there in ordinary citizen land. Conquerors and conquered - all lose much to get the result. 

So it was interesting to read the online reviews by readers of this novel about a very ordinary German family living in a semi rural community in the south of Germany during WWII. The author is German, but has been living in the US since a child. This story is based on events and stories told in her own family that took place during the war. And probably typical of millions of other families throughout all of Europe at this time. Quite a lot of reviews are damning of the book because it doesn't address at all the complicity of the German people in the terrible things that happened to populations the high command wanted to get rid of - Jews, gays, gypsies, communists, mentally ill and impaired and others. The list is huge. We ourselves don't really know how much the general population knew about what was really going on, and in a time where all news was strictly controlled, propaganda was the name of the game, you had to be careful who you expressed opinions to, it may well have been that the average person, especially out of the towns and cities did not fully know what was going on. 

In this novel, it is the latter stages of the war. People don't really know but the war has started to turn in favour of the allies,  the German war machine has been fatally damaged, but that is not stopping the hierarchy from eking every ounce of blood and muscle from every male in the country, young, old, infirm, ill. The Huber family consist of mother Etta who is doing the absolute best she can feeding her family on rations, keeping her morale up as much as possible. Husband Josef fought in WWI, and has never fully recovered from that trauma. They have two sons Max who has just arrived back home on some sort of leave from the army. He is severely traumatised, a shadow of his former self. But there is little or no means of giving him the care he needs. Younger son Georg is at Hitler School, only 15 years old, being trained up to be a perfect third Reich soldier. The chapters move primarily between Etta and Georg as they deal with the grimness of their predicament. Etta is determined to keep son Max from going back to the front line. Survival of the fittest is the name of the game for Georg, as he seeks to find a way out of the hopeless and dangerous living situation he is in. 

Being war of course, with Germany at its centrepiece, we already know the outcome of this story is not going to be a happy ever after ending. But it is a story so heartbreakingly magnificent in its telling, so tragic and sad. The struggle every day Etta has to make life as normal as possible for herself, Josef and Max; her neighbours and friends all struggling together to make life bearable, food of course being at the heart of all this effort. For Georg, his awakening sexuality causes its own problems, and then his own struggle for survival, the kindness of strangers. It is like so many WWII novels that have come out in recent years of the lives of the ordinary people. But not many have been written sympathetically from the German point of view. I really liked this. It got better as it went along, I especially liked Georg's story.  As for the comments from reviewers about the lack of acknowledgement in the story of what Germany did in the war, this isn't actually what the story is about. It's about a family, trying to survive, pure and simple.