1) "Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys
This bitterly sad, fluidly written historical novel tackles a topic woefully underdiscussed in English-language children’s fiction: Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. On June 14th, 1941, Soviet officers arrest 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother and her mother and deport them from Lithuania to Siberia. Their crammed-full boxcar is labeled, ludicrously, “Thieves and Prostitutes.” They work at a frigid gulag for eight months—hungry, filthy and brutalized by Soviet officers—before being taken to the Siberian Arctic and left without shelter. Lina doesn’t know the breadth of Stalin’s mass deportations of Baltic citizens, but she hears scraps of discussion about politics and World War II. Cold, starvation, exhaustion and disease (scurvy, dysentery, typhus) claim countless victims. Lina sketches urgently, passing her drawings along to other deportees, hoping they’ll reach Papa in a Soviet prison. Brief flashbacks, seamlessly interwoven, illuminate Lina’s sweet old life in Kaunas like flashes of light, eventually helping to reveal why the repressive, deadly regime targeted this family. Sepetys’ flowing prose gently carries readers through the crushing tragedy of this tale that needs telling. (maps, timeline, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12 & up, adult)
2) "March Violets" by Philip Kerr
A splendid first thriller introducing Bernhard Gunther, a caustic private eye who solves a case of theft, murder, and corruption among the Nazis and their new supporters--the ""march violets""--in 1936 Berlin. When the daughter of Herr Doktor Hermann Six, millionaire industrialist, and his son-in-law, Paul Pfarr, are shot together in bed, their safe robbed of a fabulous Cartier diamond necklace, and their house torched, Six engages Bernie Gunther to recover the necklace without nosing into the family's private affairs. It's a hopeless charge, for Bernie soon finds that both Pfarr and his wife were cheating on each other; that the safe contained not only diamonds but evidence that Pfarr, secretly a storm trooper, had been gathering against Six; and that Six's young second wife, the film star Ilse Rudel, is worried that Bernie's really looking for evidence of her infidelity--and is prepared to do anything to talk him out of it. Eventually, Bernie realizes--with the help of his informer-turned-assistant, Inge Lorenz--that the murders and the theft of the papers lead in different, though equally sordid, directions. In the meantime, though, he's been pressured to take a series of even bigger jobs: one client, Hermann Goering, hires him to locate Gerhard von Greis, who has the papers from Pfarr's safe--papers Goering is intent on concealing from his archrival Heinrich Himmler; and another, General Heydrich, forces him into Dachau as an undercover agent to pry the location of the papers out of the safecracker Mutschmann. Bernie repeatedly gets set up and worked over by officials, crooks, and free-lancers, but always comes up with another wisecrack about life in the Third Reich, a rich field indeed for a private eye to work. Dark, complex, and relentlessly witty--a nearly perfect marriage of threatening background and twisted plot to a German Philip Marlowe.
3) "Schindler's List" by Thomas Keneally
Like Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler was one of those precious few ""righteous gentiles"" personally responsible for the saving of Jewish lives (estimated at about 1300) during the Holocaust. But what makes Schindler's story of compelling interest to novelist Keneally--who terms this book a ""nonfiction novel,"" an act of reconstruction and homage prompted by meeting one of the Schindlerjuden survivors in a Los Angeles store--seems to be Schindler's moral stance, a more equivocal one than that of brave, heedless Nordic-knight Wallenberg. Schindler owned and operated Nazi-sponsored factories--first one producing enamel-ware in Cracow; then a munitions plant in Brinnlitz, near Auschwitz. And the Jews whom he put on his list worked for him under S.S. guard, providing material for the Reich. Still, hardly anyone died while working for Schindler . . . and he patiently plucked Jew after Jew (by requisition) out of the deathly line of vision of Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow camp in Cracow--a sadistic maniac who'd shoot a prisoner from his office window for sport; who'd ""shoot his shoeshine boy for faulty work; hang his fifteen-year-old orderly, Poldek Deresiewicz, from the ringbolts in his office because a flea had been found on one of the dogs; and execute his servant Liseik for lending a drozka . . . without first checking."" How did Schindler manage all this? Largely through frank bribery, personal charisma, sexual power, cronyism, and a kind of negligent charm in the company of Nazis. So, while Keneally's dramatization of this great man's exploits is lacking in novelistic shape or depth, the brutality and heroism are satisfyingly, meticulously presented--as plain, impressive, historical record; and if admirers of Keneally's more imaginative work may be disappointed, others will find this a worthy volume to place beside one of the several Wallenberg biographies.
4) "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok
5) "City of Thieves" by David Benioff
Novelist and screenwriter Benioff’s glorious second novel (The 25th Hour, 2000) is a wild action-packed quest, and much else besides: a coming-of-age story, an odd-couple tale and a juicy footnote to the historic World War II siege of Leningrad.
It’s New Year’s Eve, 1941, and Lev Beniov is alone in Leningrad. (Note that last name: This novel was sparked by tape-recorded memories of author Benioff’s grandfather.) The 17-year-old’s mother and sister were evacuated before the siege began in September; his father, a respected poet, was “removed” by the NKVD in 1937. Lev’s real troubles begin when a German paratrooper, frozen to death, lands on his street. Lev deserts his firefighter’s post, steals the German’s knife, is arrested by soldiers and jailed. His cellmate is 20-year-old Kolya, a boastful Cossack deserter, dazzlingly handsome in contrast to scrawny Lev, who hates his telltale big nose (he’s half-Jewish); their initial hostility turns into the closest of bonds. Sparing their lives, for now, NKVD Colonel Grechko gives them a near-impossible assignment in this starving city: five days to find a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake. There’s nothing doing on the black market. Then Kolya hears of a poultry collective…behind German lines. That’s where they must go, decides Kolya, and Benioff makes his boundless self-confidence entirely credible. Over half the novel happens in enemy territory. Lev and Kolya stumble on a farmhouse where four pretty Russian girls are being kept as sex slaves by a Nazi death squad. (The connection between sex and death is a major theme.) The slave-owners are killed by Russian partisans, one of whom is the deadly sniper Vika, a young tomboy who steals Lev’s heart. Despite a “parade of atrocities,” the pace will keep your adrenaline pumping right up to the climactic chess game between Lev and a fiendish Nazi officer.
This gut-churning thriller will sweep you along and, with any luck, propel Benioff into bestseller land.
6) "Those Who Save Us" by Jenna Blum
An emotionally estranged mother and daughter are reconciled when the daughter learns the truth about her German mother’s actions in WWII.
Blum, who is half-Jewish and of German descent, worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation as an interviewer of Holocaust survivors—and her first fiction is suffused with details about life in wartime Germany, where her protagonists Anna Schlemmer and her daughter Trudy were both born. Trudy, now a professor of German history in the Twin Cities, is divorced and, as an only child, is responsible for Anna, who has to be put in a home soon after the death of her husband Jack, the American soldier she married at war’s end. Anna rarely talks, and Trudy, who has seen a picture of her mother with a Nazi officer and a young Trudy, believing herself his daughter, is deeply ashamed. The two women tell their separate stories here as Trudy starts work on a project that involves interviewing Germans who were in Germany during the war. Anna recalls how, at 19, and living at home with her Nazi father in Weimar, she met Jewish doctor Max Stern. She hid him in her house, but Max was discovered. Anna, pregnant with Max’s child, moved in with Mathilde, a baker helping the Resistance. After daughter Trudy was born in 1940, Anna also began working for the Resistance, delivering bread to a nearby camp for officers and retrieving hidden messages on the way home. But when she witnesses a brutal killing by Horst, an officer at the camp, and was seen by him, she became his mistress in order to save Trudy’s life. Trudy finally learns the truth of her paternity—but her mother’s long and insufficiently motivated silence about it isn’t persuasive.
An ambitious but flawed first outing.
7) "The Winds of War" by Herman Wouk
8) "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer
The German occupation of the Channel Islands, recalled in letters between a London reporter and an eccentric gaggle of Guernsey islanders.
This debut by an “aunt-niece” authorial team presents itself as cozy fiction about comfortably quirky people in a bucolic setting, but it quickly evinces far more serious, and ambitious, intent. In 1946, Juliet, famous for her oxymoronic wartime humor column, is coping with life amid the rubble of London when she receives a letter from a reader, Dawsey, a Guernsey resident who asks her help in finding books by Charles Lamb. After she honors his request, a flurry of letters arrive from Guernsey islanders eager to share recollections of the German occupation of the islands. (Readers may be reminded of the PBS series, Island at War.) When the Germans catch some islanders exiting from a late-night pig roast, the group, as an excuse for violating curfew and food restrictions, invents a book club. The “Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” is born, affording Guernseyites an excuse to meet and share meager repasts. (The Germans have confiscated all the real food.) Juliet’s fractious correspondents, including reputed witch Isola, Booker, a Jewish valet who masquerades as a Lord, and many other L&PPPS members, reveal that the absent founder of their society, Elizabeth, loved Christian, a German captain. No one accuses Elizabeth of collaboration (except one crotchety islander, Adelaide) because Christian was genuinely nice. An act of bravery caused Elizabeth’s deportation to France, and her whereabouts remain unknown. The Society is raising four-year-old Kit, Elizabeth’s daughter by Christian. To the consternation of her editor and friend, Sidney, Juliet is entertaining the overtures, literary and romantic, of a dashing but domineering New York publisher, Markham. When Juliet goes to Guernsey, some hard truths emerge about Elizabeth’s fate and defiant courage. Elizabeth and Juliet are appealingly reminiscent of game but gutsy ’40s movie heroines.
The engrossing subject matter and lively writing make this a sure winner, perhaps fodder for a TV series.
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