This is a touching story about the life that came after Auschwitz; the way recovery happens, even when we won't forget or let go, even when we hold on to our pain with both hands. Recovery happens, but it's different. It brought a whole new understanding of Auschwitz and what it meant to have been there. Most of what I've seen about Auschwitz and the concentration camps focus on those perpetrating the horrors and shows the prisoners as others. Here, the Nazi's are the other and the US is not even involved. It's not about liberation or war, it's about marriage and dealing with what comes later.

The effect that the experience at Auschwitz has on the characters in this book and those who meet them after is an entirely different narrative than we're used to in the US. Sort of. It's a narrative of PTSD, which we generally reserve for veterans. The difference makes this book about the way people keep their pain close to them, how they learn to depend on it. It's the way they commiserate amongst themselves and remember together and the way that is its own sort of healing.  It's in the way they know things about themselves and each other that you only learn in those kinds of circumstances and surprises that happen when everyone attempts to return to "normal life".

Lena is our window into Heiner's world. She's the every woman who had nothing to do with Auschwitz and doesn't understand how such horrible things could happen. She doesn't appreciate the strange humor of the survivors but she loves them anyway. She also serves as the reason Heiner and his friends get to tell stories and reminisce about when they met. Her reaction is our reaction.

But the book isn't just about Heiner or Lena or some survivors of Auschwitz alone. Their lives are littered with more people than that, some of which were around before the war and others who they only knew after. Even those who don't seem that closely related at first lend depth and history to the story.

The character progression of both Heiner and Lena is remarkable. Each finds their way of dealing with everything. Their growth and the way they eventually ease into each other felt natural, like it would just happen that way. There was a force of will to help it along, but it wasn't made out to be so hard that it was not believable. Marriage sometimes takes a force of will, especially if it lasts as long as theirs. But the growth isn't just about their marriage, there's the way they deal with others as life goes on and Lena getting to know his friends. The tone of the book is beautifully nostalgic, even when they speak of horrible days. The nostalgia is because of each other, it's for each other.

I have to admit that I highlighted this book like I was going to be tested on it. There were so many lines that blew my mind, that changed the way I thought about everything involved with Auschwitz and it's few survivors. For me, it changed everything I thought I knew about Auschwitz. Since I read it on Scribd, the highlights aren't readily available but here are two quotes that were among my favorites:

They wrote down what they remembered, they spoke into microphones, yet what they'd experienced was not the same as what could be read or heard later. Their memories ought to be made into vaccines, to prevent the illnesses that had caused them.

and

They were silent, abandoned the subject, and then the fight would start all over again. She'd said just. It was that word that troubled him. Just because he was at Auschwitz. After endless debates, Lena lost her patience. Heiner, my dear, she said sharply, let me enlighten you on the word that's bothering you so much. Just is a small, embittered word with a difficult life. It has to push its way into sentences, even those where it isn't absolutely necessary, and imbue them with new meaning. First: The just in my sentence is meant in the sense of "although," and does not diminish your friend's suffering. What I wanted to say was: Although he was at Auschwitz back then, I don't have to accept it when he talks nonsense today.

And then she goes on to explain all the other ways that "just" is used because the book is every bit as much about marriage as being a survivor.

I first encountered Ravensbruck at age 10, when I read The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom’s wartime memoir, for school. Although Corrie and her sister Betsie were not imprisoned in Ravensbrück for very long, the book made an instant and indelible impression on me; it’s partly or mostly responsible for the fact that I started to read everything I could about World War II.

A few years later, I read a biography of Mother Maria Skobtsova, the Russian Orthodox nun and French Resistance member who died in Ravensbrück in 1945. But after this, it really wasn’t until I read Elizabeth Wein’s wonderful Rose Under Fire that I heard about Ravensbrück again. It was the first time I discovered the story of the Polish Rabbits–the Lublin special transport who were experimented on in the camp–and it also gave me a sense that there were many more stories to be told.

And now Sarah Helm has written a monumental book that has done just that. She began researching Ravensbrück after writing an earlier book about Vera Atkins, the SOE officer who spent the rest of her life trying to uncover the final fate of the SOE women she trained and sent into action. Four of those women died at Ravensbrück. It might have been easy to keep the focus there, to primarily tell the story of the English and American prisoners. But Helm does not do this. Included in the book are the stories and words of Polish, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Dutch, English, French, and Jewish women–and those are just the ones I’m remembering off the top of my head. She begins at the construction of the camp and continues on to show the ripples of its effect on the survivors after the war.

And I found that Helm does a marvelous job of keep the story on a human scale. When we begin to talk about 150,000 women prisoners, about 30-60,000 women killed, about the conditions and the medical experiments, it might easily become abstract, a kind of numerical problem. But we follow the stories of a few women at a time through the different periods in the camp, seeing how the conditions and decisions affect them. I found this way of storytelling so powerful, so intensely compelling, that I ended up reading this book very quickly, considering the length and subject.

Helm manages to let the voices of the survivors and victims–as well as the guards and other more culpable characters–come through, and at the same time she contextualizes them. She doesn’t shy away from presenting the circumstances of the account, the biases and self defenses of the witnesses, the questions we may never have the answers to. She is able to give an overview, to synthesize the different accounts and information to paint a picture, without denying the complexities of the situation and of the people involved–so many of whom could be both kind and unimaginably cruel.

One of the things I found most interesting were the accounts of resistance and sabotage, which were far more prevalent than I had realized. The workers in the various factories, at great personal risk, sabotaged parts for planes and bombs. Those who worked to sew clothing for German soldiers “often worked together, agreeing to destroy the finest fur by cutting it into tiny pieces, which they called poppy seed or macaroni…Others worked in groups of up to twelve, taking advice from veterans like Halina Choraznya, the Warsaw chemistry professor, who calculated how to give the anoraks special treatment by piercing the fur in such a way that it would fall apart.” Yet Helm also shows that with those acts of courage came a great price, and that this price was often demanded of others.

And yet, there were people like Halina Choraznya, who is described as “like a little mouse. Sitting there. A very strong little mouse. She organised everything,” who did act with great courage and resolve. And of course there is the amazing story of hiding the Rabbits, which appears in Rose Under Fire, and which is true. It really happened. The lights in the Appellplatz went out. We think of the people in the concentration camps as victims. But Helm (and others) show a much more complicated reality. In one sense, they were certainly victims of Nazi atrocities. But many of them also fought–in the camps, in ways small and large.

One of the major themes in Rose Under Fire is the phrase “tell the world”. It’s the motive Rose uses to keep going, and the burden she carries afterwards. What I did not realize is that, like the lights going out and the hidden Rabbits, it too is true. It occurs over and over again in the narratives of the survivors and witnesses, that same mixture of defiance and hope and responsibility. For instance: “A Norwegian prisoner told her rabbit friend that she would insist on being executed in her place. ‘You should be the one to tell the world about the crimes committed against you.'” And a prisoner who was briefly released “believed she had witnessed a monstrous crime in the making, and that she had been released by God to tell the world.” A quick Google Books search of the text turned up seventeen separate uses of the phrase, some in original testimony and some paraphrased.

It is perhaps the tragedy of Ravensbrück that the stories of the women who lived and fought and died and survived have been so forgotten, despite all their efforts. I hope that this amazing and heartbreaking book is another strike against that silence, another way to tell the world.

Moorehead examines the history and myths of the Vivarais Plateau during World War II, including the most famous village, Le Chambon. I first read about Le Chambon and the Trocmés in middle school and found them thrilling. However, Moorehead’s careful scholarship shows a much more complex and fascinating situation. Without lessening any of the heroism involved, she clarifies some of the more exaggerated stories and claims and examines how the post-war years still cast a long shadow in the area.

"And, in the process, they created a nation of readers."

This was a nice introduction to a number of pioneering women aviators. I’d recommend it for upper elementary school/middle school kids. I did have a sense that some things were a bit glossed over, which is natural, I suppose.