After a delay due to, well, you know, world events, we're back and back on schedule!
The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly
Details: Copyright 2016, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover):
"Based on the real-life story of a New York socialite who championed a group of concentration camp survivors known as the Rabbits, this acclaimed debut novel of love, redemption, and terrible secrets that were hidden for decades.
Caroline Ferriday is a former Broadway actress and liaison to the French consulate whose is forever changed when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September 1939— and then sets its sights on France. An ocean away from Caroline, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, sinks deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement. In Germany, Herta Oberheuser, a young doctor, answers an ad for a government medical position-- only to find herself trapped in a male-dominated realm of Nazi secrets and power.
The lives of these three women are set on a collision course when the unthinkable happens and Kasia is sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious Nazi concentration camp for women. Their stories cross continents, as Caroline and Kasia strive to bring justice to those whom history has forgotten."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I liked the premise even though World War II isn't one of my areas of history.
How I Liked It: This is an extremely ambitious, at times quite engaging first novel.
I was not aware that it's not just based on a true story, two of the three titular characters (or at least the three intended to be titular characters) were real people. That'd be Caroline Ferriday, the actress, and Herta Oberheuser, the Nazi. Kasia Kuzmerick, the Polish prisoner, is a composite character, presumably for the moral implications of using a real-life Holocaust survivor's real life story.
While we're on the subject of real life people, let's examine the three mains. There's Caroline, the former actress, based on the real life Caroline Ferriday. She's a whimsical, romantic sort and hers is a love story. The crux of her activism is her defense of her French love interest (a man in what's apparently a professional marriage that does not preclude him from looking elsewhere).
There's a certain element of ethical suspension whenever we fictionalize a real life character, whether it's Alexander Hamilton or Queen Elizabeth II. However, with that has to come some ethics. Given that the real life Caroline Ferriday's activism did not come (primarily) from a French lover but presumably from her own sense of justice, it sells her a bit short to have her fictional counterpart have her basis in what's essentially a sort of selfishness, even if it results in a greater altruism.
The second real life turned fictional character is Herta Oberheuser and issues abound there as well. The right amount of humanization of a Nazi to present a cautionary tale (you too can be swept into everyday evil) has to be tempered with the fact you can't risk minimizing evil. Oberheuser is actually a notorious character, the only female defendant at Nuremberg. The backstory the author gives her is sympathetic enough. A victim of regular sexual abuse at the hands of an uncle which she endures with her dreams of being a doctor. Soon enough, she's swept into the Third Reich. Her father, who regularly and willingly deals with Jewish people including a doctor who helps her education, she scorns for his idealism. Most troublingly, she's heavily suggested to have a romantic interest in women (or at least one particular female prisoner) for which she's punished by her bosses and given that that would make her the only queer character in the novel and as far as I could find there was no suggestion that the real Oberheuser had any romantic/sexual encounters/interest in women is... an interesting narrative choice to make, to say the least.
The third and truly fictional character is Kasia, the Polish resistance fighter, and oddly, she feels more human and fleshed out than the other two. We see her progression from a lovestruck teenager to prisoner, to hardened young woman, to a young mother learning to break free of her trauma.
The book is compelling and absorbing, but not without its pitfalls. For a book that begins in the late nineteen-thirties, too many terms and slang sound modern but with a "vintage" filter ("I only got friend vibrations from him" "Girlfriends first!"). The book ends somewhat unsatisfyingly. We get a suggestion of an ending for all the characters, but Kasia's is the most fleshed out and finished-seeming. We get a romantic suggestion of an ending for Caroline, and Herta survives Nuremberg and appears unable to shake the "I-was-just-following-orders!" bewilderment, which isn't quite the case for some of Nuremberg defendants and if you're going to give a Nazi first person narration (or at least let them share it with two other main characters) and get in their head to do evil, you can at least them have a satisfying conclusion and think about what they've done.
It's an ambitious first novel and it feels like it. But for its flaws (and certain unfortunate narrative choices), the writing is largely engaging and the fact the fictional character is the most interesting and nuanced speaks to the author's skills.
Final Grade: B-
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