Tag Archives: rescue

Lost Child: We Must Be Brave

01 Monday Aug 2022

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Review: We Must Be Brave, by Frances Liardet
Putnam, 2019. 452 pp. $27

When German bombs fall on Southampton, England, in December 1940, the stream of homeless refugees reaching Upton, fifteen miles away, includes a six-year-old girl. According to the tag on her clothes, she’s Pamela Pickering, but no one accompanies her or shepherds her to Upton. It seems a couple women told her to get on a particular bus, or maybe it was her mother.

But circumstances don’t immediately matter, for little Pamela has nowhere to go and, as you might expect, is very upset. Consequently, young Ellen Parr, recently married to the much older owner of the local grain mill, takes the child in, along with other evacuees. For the moment.

Lower High Street, Southampton, after German bombing raids, early December 1940 (courtesy Ministry of Information and Imperial War Museum, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205022759, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

You need not be clairvoyant to imagine how long that moment will stretch. Ellen’s attempts to trace Pamela’s surviving kin come to nothing, except to learn that the child’s mother died in an air raid, and her father hasn’t been in the picture for a while. Ellen’s husband, Selwyn, tries a little harder to find Pamela’s family; he doesn’t want the girl to remain, even after the other people they’re sheltering leave.

But he’s the soul of kindness, and he can’t help notice how attached Ellen has become to Pamela. He’s also keenly aware that he’s nearly twice Ellen’s age, and since the previous war left him impotent because of shell shock, she won’t have a child any other way. Nevertheless, you still need no crystal ball to guess that Pamela’s a borrowed child.

Like Selwyn, We Must Be Brave is kind and gentle despite the trying, bloody times, a reminder that war often brings out the best in people, not just the worst. The theme is rescue, what it means and how it works in two directions, for the motherless Pamela rescues Ellen too. To Liardet’s credit, she makes Pamela a difficult, if rewarding, charge — willful, disobedient, mercurial, capable of selfishness, yet passionate, resilient, and creative, the sort of child adults love to learn from. Ellen, though unsure of herself as a mother, understands right away that parenting is the art of the possible.

I like Liardet’s prose too, which, without attracting attention, conveys Ellen as a keen observer. This is warm, practical writing, like the narrator herself:

Somewhere in her sleeping mind she’d found a place without grief and knowledge, huddled into it like a mouse into a bole of a tree. I encircled her with my arms for five minutes or so, and she smelled of warm dry brushed cotton, and something else, that somewhat salty aroma of newly baked bread I had noticed when I lifted her off the seat of the bus. What was it? Her heated skin, her hair at the nape of her neck? I didn’t know.

Two aspects of We Must Be Brave trouble me. The first is Selwyn. I don’t understand why Ellen marries him; he seems more like a kindly, older brother, occasionally paternal, than a husband. Moreover, without a second thought, the night of Pamela’s arrival, Ellen places her in the marital bed — perhaps not surprising, but she keeps doing so. Maybe that persistence doesn’t surprise, either, but Selwyn has no reaction. That’s peculiar.

His sexual incapability resulting from the war — a trope, there — would make objections more difficult to lodge, yet he should have feelings about the interloper, I think. Is Ellen afraid of or repelled by sex? Not clear, so it’s hard to say whether she’s just not interested. The narrative suggests that, but for the war, the newlyweds would have happily led a childless life, traveling often, unencumbered. But exactly where her feelings lie never comes through, except when, years later, a friend makes a tactless, if accurate, remark about him.

Perhaps to explain Ellen’s attraction to Selwyn, the narrative backtracks to her excruciating childhood with a snobbish mother, a deadbeat father who falls into financial ruin and abandons them, and the grinding poverty that follows. That’s problem number two. I get that Selwyn’s kindness and stability offer Ellen what she lacked, and her hand-to-mouth existence then, told in unsparing detail, hits home. But that section, rather too long by half, still doesn’t persuade me about Selwyn — or at least, Ellen might entertain regrets, now and then — and slows the narrative.

In a novel like this, endgame matters perhaps more than in most, and though I get uncomfortable when the story wanders too close to modern times — not my taste —Liardet brings her narrative to a satisfying conclusion. We Must Be Brave is one of those novels that will speak to you after you’ve finished it.

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

Hiding, Sometimes in Plain Sight: A Thread of Grace

14 Monday Sep 2020

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Review: A Thread of Grace, by Mary Doria Russell
Random House, 2005. 442 pp. $17

It’s September 1943, and Italy has just surrendered to the Allies. Though that brings the war’s end one step closer, it puts in jeopardy thousands of Jews from all over Europe who’ve somehow eluded the executioners and migrated to southern France, where Italian troops have protected them. Since the surrender has destroyed that protection, most of the fugitives attempt to flee, and, for tens of thousands, northwest Italy becomes the next stage of their clandestine existence.

Sant’Andrea, a town in Liguria, scrambles to hide those who seek shelter there, a task that couldn’t be more dangerous. Not only have the Germans invaded Italy, they’ve sent crack troops to hold the line, the Waffen SS, who’ve terrorized much of Europe. Anyone who aids or harbors “rebels,” “terrorists,” or Jews will be executed, and the neighboring area will suffer reprisals.

The Memoriale della Shoah in the Milan train station of Jews deported during the Holocaust (2014 photo courtesy fcarbonara via Wikimedia Commons)

To recount the story further would be pointless and misleading, for it’s simply one “no — and furthermore” after another, a big, sprawling narrative from many perspectives, exploring as many themes. Like Italy, A Thread of Grace is warm, dramatic, good company, passionate, and a bumpy, sometimes uneven, ride, not that I care. Among other issues, Russell sifts through shades of good versus those of evil, demonstrating how telling them apart is always difficult. Her narrative discourses on killing, and whether it’s ever justifiable; what true religious faith demands; how to live, not merely exist, when you must hide; and what courage is.

But above all, Russell’s characters propel this novel. My favorite is Renzo Leoni, former pilot who fought in Ethiopia and lives in liquor because of it. He’s Jewish, yet he hides in plain sight, adopting different personae, testament to his bravery, quick thinking, and ingenuity. Sometimes he’s a German-speaking businessman who chats up the sister of the local Gestapo chief to obtain information. Other times, he’s a tradesman or a priest, whichever guise seems safest at the moment to let him visit resistance contacts. He’s also a cantankerous, exceptionally witty son who has legendary fights with his mother, dialogue that is often howlingly funny. Perhaps Renzo’s greatest gift is his ability to befriend anyone, even a Waffen SS doctor who seeks an exit from the war so he can die in relative peace from TB.

Other notables include Suora Marta, a nun so imperious that a priest of her acquaintance jokes to himself that she outranks the pope. There’s Iacopo, the rabbi for Sant’Andrea, who’s so busy helping everyone else, he neglects his own family. There’s another priest, missing part of his leg from the First World War, who makes sure Jews are welcome and cared for, though he slyly hopes to bring one or two of the ebrei into the Church.

A Thread of Grace is the fourth of Russell’s novels I’ve reviewed, and this one bears her trademark grasp of historical detail. All descriptions show activity, even of a supposedly static landscape, which livens the narrative and makes admirable storytelling:

Wrung out by five minutes’ effort fueled by a diet of poor-quality starch, spring chard, and not much else, Suora Corniglia leans against a terrace wall to muster strength and catch her breath. Beside her, tiny brown lizards dart into crevices between stones. Fig trees bake in the basil-scented warmth above meticulously attended vineyards that crisscross the hillside. The Mediterranean is a stripe of silver between gray-green foothills, and when the wind shifts, the astringency of pine from nearby mountains is replaced by the barest hint of salt and seaweed.

If you’re like me, you may wonder, here and there, whether no Italian Christian ever turned in a Jew. But in her afterword, the author insists her depiction is true to life, having found no instances of any such betrayals in her six years of research. (That may be true of northwest Italy, but elsewhere presents a mixed picture.) Regardless, I appreciate her portrayal of Jewish characters, who seem genuine, down to the refusal to eat a biscuit during Passover, and their outlook on the world, schooled by hard experience. Once or twice, they may break character in small ways, but A Thread of Grace sets the bar very high for Holocaust fiction, both in that regard, and others.

One way in which it does concerns how the author hews closely to reality. The novel encompasses almost two years of war, and if the Italian populace does its best to protect those in hiding, the Germans do their best to find the fugitives, kill them, and take revenge. Murder and torture mark this story, not just kindness and generosity.

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

The Just and Unjust

15 Monday Dec 2014

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Review: Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France, by Caroline Moorehead

HarperCollins, 2014. 374 pp. $28

This is an important, necessary work of history that reads like a novel, a tale of courage, altruism, deceit, and murder whose echoes resound more than seventy years after the fact. In telling how a cluster of French villages resisted German occupation during World War II, Village of Secrets also grasps the larger context of a humiliated, divided nation largely silent in the face of outrageous crimes.

Moorehead describes the extent to which the French police, the Vichy government, and private citizens went out of their way to catch, kill, or deport Jews, their zeal astonishing the Germans, who had, often, not even ordered these measures. As a historian who has researched Occupied France, I’ve never seen so concise and readable an account of these events.

Prisoners at Gurs detention camp, from which many thousands were deported. Gurs, France, ca. April 1941. Courtesy U.S. Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.

Prisoners at Gurs detention camp, from which many thousands were deported. Gurs, France, ca. April 1941. Courtesy U.S. Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.

Most of the narrative, however, concerns an extraordinary effort to protect hundreds of Jews, usually (but not always) children whose parents had already been sent to Auschwitz, and a smaller number of resisters, Freemasons, and Communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Incredibly, the rescuers did more than that, often extracting these people from holding camps that supplied the cargo for deportation trains. Some rescuers were Jewish social workers using false papers; many others were their Christian counterparts. In both cases, they funneled refugees to a remote plateau in the southern Massif Central, a largely Protestant enclave, where pastors and educators helped disperse them to farms and school dormitories. There, they assumed new identities, safeguarded, remarkably, by the villagers’ silence.

The main village, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, has been honored by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as Righteous Among the Nations, an extremely rare honor, and is celebrated within France. To her credit, however, Moorehead looks past these accolades; she has no interest in moral uplift or easy judgments. From her detailed account, based heavily on interviews with survivors, both rescuers and victims come across as complex, flawed people. She sifts conflicting evidence to decide when appearances deceive or the principals lied, whether to others or themselves. My favorite parts were her accounts of how the rescued Jews coped (or didn’t), and how their hosts treated them. In all the Holocaust literature I know, I’ve never read anything like it.

That said, I wish that Moorehead had taken greater care with a few details. Her research was exhaustive, but her footnotes are sketchy, which makes it harder to use her sources or even know what they are in a given context. It also compromises her devotion to truth-telling–not that I have any reason to dispute what she says, but that she fails to nail it down. For instance, the role of Pierre Laval, Vichy’s chief politician, remains controversial in some quarters, as does his execution for treason after the war. From what I’ve read, he deserved it, but solid evidence is always useful, and though Moorehead quotes at least two damaging statements, she provides no source.

I’d have also liked discussion of how the Jews being sheltered felt about their religion. I gather that few continued to practice, likely for security reasons, if no other. But surely they had feelings about abandoning their faith, and, for the children, whether that meant they had separated themselves still further from the parents they had lost.

Nevertheless, I don’t mean to detract from Village of Secrets, a terrific book and a worthy addition to the ever-growing body of work on the Holocaust.

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