Tag Archives: 1945

Kinder, Küche, Kirche: The Vanishing Sky

01 Monday Jun 2020

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Review: The Vanishing Sky, by L. Annette Binder
Bloomsbury, 2020. 278 pp. $27

In 1945, Germany’s enemies are pulverizing the country with high explosives and pounding its armies from east and west. Yet the government-controlled radio continues to promise final, total victory, demanding ever-greater sacrifice. Etta Huber, who has one teenage son with the Hitler Youth, Georg, prays for his safety, willing with all her heart that he’ll only be sent to build fortifications, not to fight. But at least her elder son, Max, is coming home to stay, after serving on the Eastern Front. Etta doesn’t ask herself why, if the army is ready to conscript fifteen-year-old Georg, Max would be discharged. All she knows is that Max is coming home to Heidenfeld, their small, rural town, and that she’ll take care of him, as always.

But when Max steps off the train — and in succeeding days, when his strange behavior draws notice and gossip, as at church — Etta realizes something’s wrong with him. Since he’s thin, with no sign of physical injury, she decides that if she feeds him enough, he’ll get better. The reader, like the doctors who try politely to tell her what she refuses to hear, knows this once-vibrant, intelligent young man who loved nature and laughter is now mentally disturbed and unlikely to recover.

The Vanishing Sky reveals the German homefront as I’ve never seen it in fiction, a small town where nobody asks too many questions or unburdens herself, so that neighbors who’ve known one another all their lives are strangers. One unforgettable instance comes after Etta visits her closest friend Ilse, who shows her a basement full of belongings she’s keeping for Jewish friends against the day when “they return”:

Maybe it was the liquor or maybe the coming rain. The road looked narrower than usual when Etta walked home. The wind bit through her scarf. She thought of those dolls in their patent shoes and all that fine silver and the clocks ticking in the cellar and Ilse keeping watch, just Ilse and her whiskey jars. How hard to be in that house, along with all those things. The air must be thick with ghosts. How little she knew about Ilse. More than forty years together and church every week. They drank their coffee and birthed their babies and knelt together at their family graves, and they were mysteries one to the other.

Ilse must trust Etta to confide such a secret, because there’s plenty of war spirit running around, and plenty of ways to punish defeatism, disloyalty, or violations of any rule. Etta’s husband, Josef, in fact, would be such a man to turn in even his own children. He takes absolutely no interest in Max’s return, only in his son’s medals, of which he’s jealous. Josef believes in final victory and chuckles at radio reports of German victories resulting in thousands of hapless Allied prisoners captured.

But, as a former schoolteacher sent into retirement because he’s no longer mentally sharp enough to manage his lessons, Josef represents a comment on the Reich’s ideology. He’s no superman, and you have to wonder whether Binding means to suggest that Max’s psychological illness has a hereditary component. More apparent is Georg’s infirmity; he’s never reached puberty and remains pudgy, physically inept despite rigorous training, and “soft.” He knows he’s not the youth in the Nazi propaganda posters, and that he wouldn’t last five minutes in battle, which is why he dreams of escape.

With Etta, Binding evokes another ideological trope, the phrase Kinder, Küche, Kirche, “children, kitchen, church,” women’s place in Reich society. Nobody could have accepted that role or performed it more faithfully than Etta, but it’s not enough to restore her elder child. At times, her insistence that one more letter, plea, or bribe will spring him from the hospital can be wearing, because the narrative runs in circles: You know the result will always be the same, and that it will make no impression on her. Even so, you have to admire her determination in the face of doom. She’s a true tragic figure.

Binding tells her story patiently, like an artist placing tiny pieces into a mosaic. The Vanishing Sky is no novel to race through. But I find it thoroughly gripping, powerful, and a brave narrative unsparing in its honesty.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher; this post appeared in Historical Novels Review in shorter, different form.

When Memory Plays Tricks: Devastation Road

20 Monday Nov 2017

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Review: Devastation Road, by Jason Hewitt
Little, Brown, 2015. 379 pp. $20

In spring 1945, an injured man wakes in a field. He’s got only the vaguest idea of who he is–he’s English, and his name is Owen–but he’s wearing clothes that don’t fit, he can’t remember how he got hurt, why he’s where he is, how he got there, or where there is, except that it must be Europe. To judge from what he sees, it must be Central Europe, but he can’t tell what country.

Marshal Konev leads the Red Army into Prague, May 1945 (courtesy Karel Hájek, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Czech boy, Janek, who speaks barely a word of English, adopts him and claims to have rescued him, but Owen’s not sure of that, and, to some extent, resents how Janek sticks to him like glue. But the boy is useful, scrounging food and keeping a keen eye out for dangers that Owen might otherwise blunder into. Through Janek, Owen also learns that there’s a war on, and he slowly realizes that he’s played a part in it, and what that part is. Eventually, they meet a Polish woman, Irena, who attaches herself to them, though each has a different aim. Owen wants to go home. Janek insists he must find his brother, Petr, a Resistance hero. Irena, whose head has been shaved, says that she just wants to be safe–it’s hard for a Jew, she says–but you get the idea that she wants someone to take care of her, and Owen, as an Englishman, is the obvious choice.

I like the way Hewitt pieces together his narrative, showing how Owen gradually realizes who he is, memories triggered by a button, a phrase on a scrap of paper, a facial expression, or how light looks. As images return to him of his former employment as a draftsman for an aircraft manufacturer; his older brother, Max; their parents; and Max’s fiancée, the reader senses that Owen’s disorientation isn’t just post-traumatic stress. He’s also suppressing certain memories out of guilt.

To weld these disparate fragments into a coherent narrative takes great skill, and nearly all Hewitt’s transitions between past and present meld seamlessly. His descriptions, based on apparently thorough research, effortlessly depict the era and the settings. Further, he conveys Owen’s fluid, ever-varying states of mind with authority:

It was not that he was lost that concerned him most. Nor was it that he had found himself in a war that he remembered so little about, which now seemed to be consuming everything and everyone within it. Nor was it that he had ended up in an obscure country that in the past had been nothing more than a strange name in the news broadcasts, or, even, that somehow he seemed to have wiped several years from his mind. No, what concerned him most was that things he now knew for sure–and knew that he knew–could suddenly be lost again, and then found, and lost once more, as if they had never been there in the first place.

Despite these attributes, rendered in lucidly beautiful prose, Devastation Road presents quite a few obstacles. Chief among them is how irritating all three main characters are. Owen seems too earnest, even clueless, to be a survivor, and it’s hard to believe he was involved in the war, because he lacks the necessary guile or instinct that warriors must possess if they’re to overcome the inevitable setbacks they face. Janek is too much the entitled teenager for my taste, as if he too hasn’t reckoned with or been leveled by the war, even though he grew up in it. He evokes flickers of sympathy, yet the narrative grabs most when he’s not involved. Irena’s truly appalling, selfish as the day is long, and it’s pretty obvious she’s lying about something. What has happened to her is both awful and painful, sure, and even holds the potential for tragedy, but that side feels too mechanical and distant, so that her grasping nature overshadows the rest.

Devastation Road works best, I think, as a study of one man’s psychology, the story of his unfolding, tricky memory. If you can hold onto that, the novel will be worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Bloody Pastures: The Black Snow

19 Monday Sep 2016

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Review: The Black Snow, by Paul Lynch
Little, Brown, 2014. 264 pp. $25

It’s 1945, and the Second World War is in its final, convulsive months, but in county Donegal, Irish country folk have their own violent conflicts to think about. The barn belonging to Barnabas Kane, an up-and-coming farmer, has burned, killing forty-three head of cattle and a handyman, Matthew Peoples. The fires have hardly cooled before the whisperings begin: Barnabas sent Matthew into the barn and was therefore responsible for his death. But no charges have been filed, and no one really knows what happened.

Glengesh Pass, county Donegal, northwest Ireland (Courtesy Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Glengesh Pass, county Donegal, northwest Ireland (Courtesy Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Nevertheless, Baba Peoples, the late man’s crazy widow, believes Barnabas killed her husband, and that the Kanes owe her compensation. She even goes so far as to point out that Eskra, Barnabas’s wife, has brought “foreign ways” to the village; Eskra keeps bees, for example. What else would you expect from a woman born in America? For that matter, villagers hostile to the Kanes–which, by now, is most of them–remind one another that Barnabas came from America too, forgetting that he was born in Donegal, emigrated, and returned with Eskra as his bride. It’s a brilliant stroke on Lynch’s part, showing how quickly superstition and prejudice prevent any reasonable assessment of the tragedy and turn it into an occult act perpetrated by evil, so-called outsiders.

Consequently, Lynch gets remarkably far with a deceptively simple premise, and he’s not done. Not only does Barnabas privately wonder whether he did, in fact, send Matthew to his death, he’s quick to notice who among his neighbors failed to help quell the flames and to suspect that the fire resulted from arson. (A diary kept by his teenaged son, Billy, suggests that Barnabas may be right, though not for the reasons he believes.) True or not, however, his paranoid fantasies mirror what the villagers say about him, and his deep, angry depression makes him both impossible to live with and incapable of repairing the barn–for awhile, anyway. So nobody in The Black Snow gets off lightly, even when they deserve sympathy; the novel explores a complex moral problem, with no easy answers.

I also admire the prose, which, at its best, is poetic.

The plough still in the tapered field, poised with the lean of an animal in the moment before attack, its teeth bared waiting to tear at the neck of the earth, but it sat with a dog’s patience through days of raw cold and then rain and he had not the strength to go back to it.

However, though I like this passage, there are others I find self-consciously ornate. Lynch is much too fond of fragments, and though the one above works, they don’t always. Further, as I read phrases like “the damask of puzzlement on her face,” I’m puzzled too, enough to pull me out of the narrative. Or I read “That rain came with a venomous slant to cut a man wide open,” and I’m stopped again, wondering why Lynch needs venom on top of cutting someone apart.

And that’s the problem with The Black Snow–it’s over the top. Barnabas Kane (Cain?) eventually gets out of bed and rebuilds his barn, putting his faith in a fresh start. However, the setbacks come pretty hard afterward, and though I applaud these instances of “no; and furthermore,” I don’t believe them, especially when it comes to further violence from Billy and, of all people, Eskra. It feels strange to write this, for I’m one to criticize characters granted redemption they haven’t earned. In such cases, I’m tempted to ascribe that to a desire to appease the reader, a goal often (but not always) more common to commercial rather than literary fiction. But with The Black Snow, the most literary novel I could imagine, I find myself criticizing a narrative that refuses to grant redemption to characters who’ve plainly earned it, dealing out further punishment that’s frankly incredible. Go figure.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Life Hangs on Chance: City of Secrets

26 Thursday May 2016

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Review: City of Secrets, by Stewart O’Nan
Viking, 2016. 194 pp. $22

Brand, a Latvian survivor of the Holocaust, drives a taxi in Jerusalem in 1945. But that simple statement skips over many complexities. The British are clinging to their mandate over Palestine, refusing entry to dispossessed Jews like Brand and combing the population for illegal immigrants, whom they deport. Consequently, he must live underground, so his papers, taxi, and apartment come courtesy of a revolutionary cell committed to Israeli independence, which knows him only as Jossi. Since even the possession of a weapon is a hanging offense, ferrying his comrades to clandestine rendezvous or military operations puts him in great danger.

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Naturally, Brand becomes more than a chauffeur, about which he has mixed feelings–repugnance at violence, excitement at wielding power, pride in helping create a Jewish homeland. But as his role widens, he realizes that his cell, which he thought belonged to the Haganah, a comparatively moderate organization, has been taken over by the more violent, provocative Irgun. What holds him together is his love for Eva, a fellow Latvian and cell member, who arouses his jealousy by working as a prostitute to gain information.

From this tense, conflict-ridden premise comes a thriller of remarkable depth and breadth, especially considering how spare it is. The jacket quotes a blurb by Alan Furst, and O’Nan deserves the compliment in more than one way. Not only has he shown the same elegant economy as the best of Furst’s more recent World War II thrillers, he’s pushed the envelope. Rather than have Brand be an expert, O’Nan makes him an amateur who can’t master his risky impulses to retain human connection when the smart money says to shut up and pretend you see nothing. But how could he remain silent, when his wife, parents, grandparents, and sister were all murdered, and when he watched a friend stomped to death in a concentration camp? Brand’s confusion and ambivalence, rather than sangfroid or professional devotion, are what drive the narrative.

As with Furst, City of Secrets tastes of atmosphere:

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. . . . The very stones were secondhand, scavenged and fit back into place haphazardly, their Roman inscriptions inverted. It was the rainy season, and the walls were gray instead of golden, the souks teeming with rats. An east wind thrashed the poplars and olive trees, stirring up trash in cul-de-sacs, rattling windows. He’d lost too much weight during the war and couldn’t get warm.

When Brand goes into action, there’s tension aplenty. But the author also captures tension of a different kind, the everyday variety. Brand must wait for information, which usually comes unexpectedly and never fully enough to satisfy his curiosity. Every drive through Jerusalem means passing British roadblocks, where there’s always a chance he’ll be discovered as an illegal immigrant, or that soldiers will search his car and find what he’s not supposed to have. He craves Eva’s company, but also her love, which she denies him, and which he’s learned never to discuss. Accordingly, every move Brand makes, even if it’s to stay in his apartment, alone, ratchets up the stakes.

City of Secrets manages to suggest much about politics and hatreds without having to narrate them, an admirable part of the economy I mentioned. O’Nan conveys the bitter divisions between the Haganah and the Irgun; the British occupiers’ anti-Semitism; and the moral challenges inherent to fighting for a righteous cause. I like City of Secrets much better than a novel I reviewed on a similar subject, I Lived in Modern Times, or, for that matter, O’Nan’s West of Sunset, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years. That was a nice novel; City of Secrets is terrific.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

To Life: Fever at Dawn

23 Monday May 2016

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Review: Fever at Dawn, by Péter Gárdos
Translated from the Hungarian by Elizabeth Szász
Houghton Mifflin, 2016. 232 pp. $24

Imagine a Hungarian Holocaust survivor in 1945, receiving medical care in Sweden under Red Cross auspices. He weighs practically nothing, and he has metal false teeth, the real ones having been knocked out by thugs. Miklós’s doctor tells him he has tuberculosis, which will kill him in six months. But Miklós did not endure deportation, imprisonment, and torture only to succumb to an ancient plague, and he refuses to believe the diagnosis. So when he comes across a list of 117 Hungarian Jewish women also recuperating in Sweden, he proceeds to write each one, hoping to find a mate.

"Selection" of Hungarian Jews for either work or the gas chambers, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), May or June 1944 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

“Selection” of Hungarian Jews for either work or the gas chambers, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), May or June 1944 (Courtesy Yad Vashem, via Wikimedia Commons)

The results, by turns poignant and comical, carry this remarkable premise to a satisfying conclusion. But in saying so, I’m giving nothing away, for Gárdos has written this slim novel about his parents, drawing heavily on the bundles of letters his mother unearthed more than a half-century later and gave to him.

However, if Fever at Dawn ends predictably–the jacket flap leaves little doubt–how the narrative gets there is anything but ordained. Miklós, either a warm-hearted con artist or a vivid dreamer (take your pick), promises Lili Reich that everything will work out just fine, both between them and in life. This is a pretty astounding message for someone you’ve met only in brief letters, especially someone who was nearly left for dead at Bergen-Belsen. But Miklós actually believes it; and Lili, at first with reservations, gradually comes to believe it too. How he works that alchemy is marvelous to behold, and at times a little bewildering, because he can’t resist a soapbox. An ardent Socialist, whereas Lili is bourgeoise, Miklós lectures her on the proper way to view the world. It’s not always clear whether he takes himself seriously, but it’s his confidence that touches her, gives her hope.

But we all know the path to true love never did run smooth, and this courtship faces large barriers. For one thing, the two live in distant places, and the rules strictly forbid them to visit. They scheme, wheedle, plot, and attempt to manipulate their caregivers, pretending that they’re cousins–the oldest dodge in the book, which has no chance of persuading anyone.

Meanwhile, another of the 117 women shows up at Miklós’s rehabilitation center. How she manages is never explained, but she calls him her soul mate and expects him to work out every difficulty her presence causes so that they can be together forever. How Miklós gets around that uncomfortable situation, I won’t say. But I have to quote you the author’s description of what Lili and a girlfriend see when the two lovers meet for the first time, at a train station:

Miklós spotted the reception committee in the distance and smiled. His metal teeth glimmered in the weak light of the platform lamps.

The girls glanced at each other in alarm, then looked guiltily back toward the platform where Miklós was advancing through the thick veil of snow. He had to rest for a moment while he coughed. The left lens frame of his glasses was stuffed with scrunched-up newspaper–that day’s Aftonbladet–an operation he had performed in desperation half an hour earlier, leaving a crack free so that he could at least see a little. . . . . his borrowed winter coat, two sizes too big for him, floated around his ankles.

There are very few flashbacks, because neither Lili nor Miklós care to tell the other how they survived the war, or what they went through. But the author wants you to know, so there are a couple harrowing pages that put their romantic struggles into perspective. After sufferings like theirs, and what they’ve gone through to be able even to contemplate love, problems of time, distance, or unsympathetic, priggish administrators mean absolutely nothing. When you’re determined to love, you will.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.