The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

I vividly remember reading this book. I was home sick and read it from cover to cover in about 3 days, even though the book is over 600 pages. I absolutely could not put it down, despite not feeling well at all. The book begins with Mendelsohn describing how his elderly relatives would cry when he entered a room. They would tell him how much he looked like his Great Uncle, Schmiel. No one would ever say anything more about Schmiel, his wife, or his four daughters, other than they were “killed by the Nazis”. Later, as an adult, he found a set of letters from Schmiel, asking for help to leave Poland. Mendelsohn decided to search for more information, and to see if it would be possible to find out exactly what had happened to them.

Mendelsohn’s research uncovers as much information about the small town of Bolechow as it does about his family. He travels to meet the survivors of the town who are now living in Israel, Australia, and many other places. His goal is to get as many descriptions as possible of the life they lived and what happened during the war. The stories he hears are like many stories from other towns of Eastern Europe: how the local population were often worse in their persecution of the Jewish population, but also how brave people helped or hid some of the Jewish people. In addition, he learns the complicated history of this town which had belonged to several different countries over time, including Poland and Ukraine.

The book is a combination of a personal journal, a mystery story, and a historical quest. Mendelsohn succeeds because he learns not just about his family’s deaths, but also about their lives. They become real people to him with personalities, likes and dislikes, and complicated lives before they died. They are no longer just six names listed among the six million who died.

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Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow

After his father died, Stewart Dubinsky found a batch of papers that related to things about his father that Stewart had never known. So Stewart sets out to find out his father’s story in an effort to know him better. This premise sounds so familiar you might think that the book would be boring or formulaic, but that is far from the truth. The secret that Stewart’s father, David, was hiding is that he was court martialed and sentenced to prison in 1945 after serving in Europe for more than a year. Stewart is so shocked by this revelation that he is determined to find the whole story.

David was a lawyer serving in the Army’s judge advocate general office during the army’s march across Europe after D-Day. He spent most of his time prosecuting or defending soldiers accused of crimes against French citizens; but in 1944 he was assigned to the case of Robert Martin, an OSS officer who had either become a spy or gone rogue. When David met Martin he became involved in one of Martin’s covert operations. He also became involved with Martin’s companion Gita, a woman who may or may not have still been Martin’s lover. Shortly after that, Martin and Gita both disappeared.

After the German surrender, Martin was finally recaptured and David was sent to bring him to trial. Instead, Martin disappeared again David was accused of letting Martin go. Shortly after his conviction, though, David is released without serving any time. Why would they suddenly drop all charges? This is the mystery Stewart is searching for the answer to, as well as the question of whether his father released the man he spent so much time searching for and if so, why.

The story of Stewart’s father’s service in WWII is a fascinating one. He becomes involved in the Battle of the Bulge and other fighting simply because he is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is privy to some of the secrets of OSS and not to others. Turow’s novel is very different from his usual courtroom thrillers, but it is just as compelling. Even more interesting to me is the fact that many episodes of the book were based on stories Turow heard from his own father, who served as a medic in WWII.

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The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

I first read The Hiding Place when I was a teenager, and I was immediately caught up in this true story of a quaint, old-fashioned family of watchmakers in Haarlem, Holland, in the 1940s who are drawn into working for the Underground Resistance during the Nazi occupation. The story was so compelling that I don’t believe I looked up once till the book was over and dawn was streaking the sky outside my window. Fortunately, it was the weekend, and the book is only 241 pages long!

Corrie and Betsie are unmarried sisters in their fifties, living with their eighty-year-old father, when tentative knocks began to be heard at their alley door. A Jewish neighbor whose shop has been closed by the Nazis is afraid to go home to his upstairs apartment. A Jewish mother and her newborn baby need a place to stay till she is well enough to travel. Can they help?

Corrie and her family are staunch members of the Dutch Reformed Church and law-abiding citizens, but they can’t turn away the needy from their door. At first they provide a halfway house for Jews and other refugees seeking asylum in the countryside, but eventually their home becomes a “hiding place” for seven Jews who for one reason or another cannot be placed elsewhere.

As their ring of contacts grows ever larger and more complex, the chances that their activities will be discovered becomes ever greater. One night during Passover, their next door neighbor knocks on their side door: “Do you think your Jews could sing a little more softly? We can hear them through the walls . . .”

Your Jews. The family realizes that their secret isn’t really a secret at all, and it is just a matter of time before they are arrested. Despite all their drills and precautions, one night it happens. Corrie, Betsie, and their father are taken into custody, but thanks to a carefully constructed secret room at the top of the stairs, their Jews remain safe.

However, even though they are now at the mercy of their captors, their calling to be a “hiding place” becomes more important than ever. The same love and faith that led Corrie and Betsie to help those in need not only sustains them during the dark years of their imprisonment, but becomes a shining place of hope that shelters those who gather around them. They discover that even the smallest acts of kindness can plant seeds that grow and make a community among those whose pain would otherwise tear them apart.

There are so many wonderful things I could tell you about this book, but I want you to discover them for yourself. However, this story is anything but sugar-coated, I warn you — the graphic details of human cruelty and suffering are painful, but seeing how love triumphs in the midst of darkest evil makes this one of the most inspiring stories I have ever read.

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The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons

“Viennese Jewess, 19, seeks position as domestic servant.  Speaks fluid English.  I will cook your goose.”

So reads the “Refugee Advertisement” Elise Landau places in British newspapers.  It draws a response from the Rivers family and Elise accepts a position as a servant at Tyneford House, even though looking back she recalls “When I received the letter that brought me to Tyneford, I knew nothing about England, except that I wouldn’t like it.”

Thus ends Elise’s life as the cosseted daughter of a famous and artistic family; her mother is a renowned opera singer and her father a critically acclaimed (except by Hitler’s government, which despises him) novelist.  Her parents hope to get a visa to America, but in the meantime they do everything in their power to get Elise out of Austria.

Once in England, Elise struggles to find her place.  She’s gone from being waited on by servants to waiting on others.  No more sleeping in and waking to a steaming cup of hot chocolate and freshly laundered clothes.  Now she’s up at dawn, preparing fires, cleaning, and generally trying to look as busy as possible.  She realizes that sauntering through the day is a mark of privilege and she misses it.

But most of all she misses her family.  The House at Tyneford is the story of someone who sees her world disappear overnight and struggles to create a new life in a strange place that is itself changing rapidly.  I found Elise very sympathetic and her efforts to fit in engrossing.  The descriptions of Vienna and Tyneford are so vivid I found myself longing for a cup of Viennese coffee and inhaling with gusto the salt air of the English coast.

With its atmospheric writing and bittersweet portrait of a young girl doing her best to adjust as a world fragments around her I recommend this book to anyone, particularly readers of historical fiction, fans of novelist Kate Morton and devotees of the PBS series Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey.

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My Enemy’s Cradle by Sara Young and Skeletons At the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

I inherited a healthy dose of love of history from my parents, but I can never stand to get my history fix from non-fiction. Since I finished college, any new knowledge of history comes through novels and movies – enough to make a decent showing in the first round of Jeopardy. Call it laziness if you will, but I prefer to think of it as the equivalent of adding a little sugar to your vegetables to make them more palatable.

One area of history that I became fixated with as a teenager is Holocaust fiction. I blame (or credit depending on the book) Leon Uris. But I thought you could only read so much Holocaust fiction before you feel you’ve got the general picture. Two novels published in the last year or so changed my opinion.

The first is My Enemy’s Cradle by Sara Young. Cradle focuses on a program the Nazis created to continue producing Aryan babies – called Lebensborn. Essentially the Reich had facilities where pregnant women of ‘superior’ quality could go to have their babies and those babies were then adopted out to suitable Nazi families. In Cradle, Cyrla is sent by her family in Poland to live with her aunt and uncle in the Netherlands.  But the neighbors know she is Jewish and she is in danger of being exposed to the occupying Germans. In desperation, she takes on her recently dead cousin’s identity and hides herself from the Nazis in their midst at one of these facilities. I admit the story could have been better written, but the subject was completely new to me and held my interest throughout the novel.

The other novel is Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian. While not strictly a Holocaust novel, there are parts of this book that certainly qualify it. The story is set in the waning days of WWII when Germany’s loss was all but certain, in an area that has belonged to both Poland and Germany, but at the time is held by Germany. A well-off farming family decides to flee the advancing Russian forces and joins the long lines of people attempting a similar flight. With them they have a Scottish POW, also secret lover to the daughter of the family. While on their journey, the narration skips between the various family members, the POW and a German soldier that they partner up with who just so happens to be an escaped Jew masquerading as a Nazi. What I love about this book – because it is well written – is the completely new (to me) point-of-view. Here is a family that supports the Nazi cause in the sense that it keeps them safe from the Russians, but has lived isolated from real knowledge of what the Reich has been doing and when forced to see it has to reconcile their fundamental beliefs with the horrors they discover. Bohjalian creates wonderful characters and there wasn’t one person in the story that I minded hearing tell it in their own way.

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