I have occasionally hit upon a compelling topic and read my way through the library’s collection of similar titles. There was my Jon Krakauer obsession about Mt. Everest climbers, and the summer I spent on Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, followed by a dozen other solo sailors’ tales.
This year I have been reading about World War II. I wish every politician of every stripe would read some of these as we tap-dance at the edge of war after war after war. My list is half fiction and half nonfiction; it just happened that way. Here are views of the war from all sides — Allies, Germany, and Italy, and the caught-in-the-middle Europeans and Americans. If the last book you read about the war was The Diary of Anne Frank, you might want to check out a few of these titles. All are “good reads.”
I started with the popular The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris, a controversial book accused of whitewashing the experience of the extermination of Jews. The story is gut-wrenching, a page-turner, and can be forgiven for having, to the extent possible, a “happy ending.” Sometime later I read the same author’s Cilka’s Journey, the deeper story of a character in the first book. The theme of these, as with most of the titles I have read, is what you do to survive, and what consequences you suffer as a result. Also related to these two books is Auschwitz Lullaby by Mario Escobar. The tattooist talks about the Roma children in the camp, and Escobar finishes the tale based on a true story and featuring Dr. Mengele. Horror fiction indeed. The final novel in my pile is Pam Jenoff’s The Orphan’s Tale about two women, one a Jew, caught up in the war, hiding in plain sight in a traveling circus, which really did exist.
The nonfiction titles are more eclectic. Peter Finn’s A Guest of the Reich is the story of American socialite Gertrude Legendre. She was a spoiled brat from start to finish, despite having given up her flamboyant lifestyle of big-game hunting and parties for service in the wartime OSS. As the war was ending, she commandeered a Jeep on a lark to the front outside Paris; she stupidly ended up on the wrong side of the Allied lines. Her resulting captivity was very cushy compared to most prisoners, but her companions suffered as a result of her whim.
Another memoir is Irmgard A. Hunt’s On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood. Born as Hitler rose to power, the author bases much of the story on her mother’s diary, centering on her family, who voted for the Führer to escape the chaos of Germany after the First World War. Living in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, very close to Hitler’s famous Eagle’s Nest refuge, their experience of the war was relatively benign despite the death of her father in battle. The violence only came to their village as the war neared its close. I was reminded of German people who proudly showed us their Nazi scrapbooks when I lived in Germany in the 1960s.
A Castle in Wartime: One Family, Their Missing Sons and the Fight to Defeat the Nazis by Catherine Bailey takes us to Italy, where aristocratic Fey von Hassel lived a charmed life. Her father was Hitler’s ambassador to Italy, and she married a wealthy Italian who owned an estate in northern Italy. When the Italians collapsed and the Germans took over parts of Italy, her home became an SS headquarters and she walked a fine line. Increasingly anti-Nazi, Fey’s father was executed for taking part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Her husband, working with the Resistance, was separated from her, and their sons were taken captive by the Nazis. This is a story of survival from a different point of view.
Then, browsing the shelves, I came across Margaret Bourke-White’s Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly. The renowned and exquisitely talented photographer collected many images of the last days of the Third Reich, combining them with lengthy captions. Traveling with Gen. George Patton, she photographed the devastation of war, including the liberation of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp.
War is hell. These books present the Catch-22 of war: if you do anything you can to survive and live tell the story, do you become a collaborator with the enemy?
Copyright 2020 by retired librarian and voracious reader Jeanne Bracken, who believes any good day is an excuse to sit outside with a book.
Leave a Reply