The best books with stories of survival in WWII that go beyond the battlefield

William Brodrick is a British solicitor who became a lawyer after leaving a monastery where he was a monk. Like Brodrick, I have re-invented myself as an author after 40 years of working as a medical educator. Knowing what it took for me to succeed in a new career, I admire what it cost the author to achieve such a radical shift. Monk-turned-lawyer-turned-Novelist Brodrick has written a stunning story about a guard at a WWII death camp who is being brought to trial fifty years after the war. The story is told by Anselm, a lawyer who left the Old Baily in London where he worked as a solicitor, to become a monk at Larkwood Priory (the reverse of the author’s life).

Another reason this story speaks to me so profoundly has to do with my background. I am the eldest child in an abusive family that enforced silence about what we were experiencing. The back story of The Sixth Lamentation narrates the story of an elderly woman who presently has ALS but who, as a young woman, transported Jewish children out of Paris to safety. She, herself, became a prisoner at the death camps and knew the defendant. However, she cannot testify due to her inability to speak or write. My life has not been so constrained, but it was only after my father died that I could bring myself to speak about his alcoholism, his violence toward my mother, and its impact on me.   

This is a 750+ page book and a tour de force. I have profound sympathy for the Jewish people, and the horrors they endured under Nazi rule. None of the things I have suffered in my life, including living with a violent alcoholic father, came even close to the fears and degradation experienced by the people in this book. My own survival techniques included hiding and avoidance of anything that would trigger my father’s anger. As the eldest, I also tried to shield my younger siblings. Thus, I was as unobtrusive as possible, a survival technique minorities have used for centuries.

This story begins in 1937 with a young Hungarian Jewish man who goes to Paris to study architecture. Asked to deliver a letter to a woman’s nephew, he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient and eventually, despite her own dark secrets, they fall in love. As a Jew, he is fearful of the increasingly terrifying strictures imposed upon him, his brother who is studying medicine in Italy, and his family in a small Hungarian town. He is conscripted several times and struggles to survive in the brutal Carpathian winters. Using beautiful prose, the author compels her readers to become one with this family of Jews in the darkest times of the last century.   

Peekay is a little boy born in a South Africa divided by racism and hatred. After being adored by a Zulu nanny during his early childhood, he is sent away to a boarding school at a young age when his mother has a mental breakdown. I, too, had a divided life as a child. I spent the school year in my parent’s home with its dire poverty and abuse and then was set blissfully free to spend my summers at my grandmother’s farm, a loving sacred haven. The two disparate sides of my life predispose me to feel intensely for children who suffer from abuse.

I cried for Peekay who is called a Roonik, a derogative term for the despised English who fought the Afrikaners during the Boer War. He is tortured by the older students, German boys who have been taught to idolize Adolph Hitler. Eventually, he meets Hoppie Groenewald, a guard on a train who is a boxer. He thinks Peekay has talent and inspires his dream of becoming the welterweight boxing champion of the world. He becomes a professional boxer and eventually, because of his love for African Americans, is hailed as the savior of the tribes in Africa.

This story appealed to me at the outset because of my interest in people whose property was confiscated due to the turmoil of war. I have a grandfather who was a famous artist. Because he was painting in the 1930s, his original artworks were sold in their entirety to the major magazines of the day. Nowadays, artists sell the rights to their work, but retain the original paintings. I have spent much of my adult life tracking down his paintings that were lost to the family.

Susan Wiggs’ character, Tess Delaney, makes a living returning stolen or lost objects to their rightful owners. At the beginning of the book, she returns a valuable lavalier necklace to an elderly woman. Somewhat later, she is shocked to learn she has a grandfather she never knew about and that she has been named in his will to inherit half of Bella Vista, a hundred-acre apple orchard. The other half goes to Isabel Johansen, a half-sister she didn’t know about either. Going through her grandfather’s ‘get well soon’ cards, she finds one from the very woman whose lavalier necklace she returned at the beginning of the story and learns her grandfather and the necklace’s owner were both sent as children to a concentration camp called Theresienstadt in Denmark. The book weaves back and forth between Copenhagen in the early 1940s, when Tess’s grandfather and his family owned one of the famous Romanov eggs, and the present. 

This book is powerful to me because of the intense mother/daughter conflict she relates. My mother was lovely, well-read, and held an important position at our state university. However, she was also extremely critical of her children. Because I never rebelled against my mother, I was entranced with Joanne Harris’ young character, Framboise, who plans and carries out a rebellion against her mother that is worthy of the French resistance. Many years later, when Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation.

The past and present are inextricably entwined in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise inherited from her now-deceased mother. The journal contains the key to the tragedy that indelibly marked that summer of her ninth year. The mother and daughter were virtual enemies during her childhood and Framboise used the juice of the orange to trigger her mother’s migraines, confining her to bed while she and her siblings had free access to a small town under German occupation.