Krishna
The prolog starts with the death of Trudy Swenson’s dad Jack in 1993. There is a whole lot of background in that word ‘dad’. Her mother Anna is with her. The story moves then to the beginning. Anna is a young girl and her mother died five years ago and her father Gerhard bought her a dachshund whom she named Spaetzle. When he chokes she takes him and runs to a nearby clinic to see the doctor.
What a brilliant story! Starts here and does not let up. Not until the very last sentence!
The doctor happens to be Jewish and Anna is Aryan. He has a Star of David painted on his door. However he drops everything and helps Anna and sends her away.
Anna has a father with an anger problem.
Meanwhile Anna and Max, the doctor, develop a friendship. The doctor expands her mind, and teaches her chess.
One day she goes for shopping because her dad Gerhard is excited and wants Anna to get choice meats and flowers and sends her. Anna is shocked to find the pharmacist, an old man, standing naked right in the middle of the street with a board proclaiming ‘I am a dirty Jew’ around his neck. SS is in town! When Anna tries to give her coat to him – the day is very cold – he hisses at her to leave him alone because ‘they are watching’. She runs to the house of Max but Max is missing too. His house has been ransacked. Anna is in great panic!
But Max comes to her house as a fugitive. His glasses have been broken and found by Anna who keeps it in her pockets. He explains the SS aktion and what it means to Jews. Anna hides him in a secret store room and they have sex – many times. Meanwhile, Gerhard wants to show off Anna, who is beautiful, to SS officials with a view to marrying her off to his future advantage.
Anna seems to get morning sickness and during a party, she chokes. In addition, they har Max sneezing and thumping, since the walls are thin! Anna manages to hide this, but she does not realize that she is now pregnant.
When she finally manages two false identities with the idea of joining Max and running away to Switzerland, she comes home to find the secret room empty. Realizes that Gerard has guessed and has taken Max to give to SS for personal gain. Something inside her snaps. She then leaves that night and escapes.
This is what they call a ‘dual timeline story’ with the plot moving back and forth. Back to the present (well 1996 in the story), Anna is now totally helpless. Trudy has not seen her in months and had to visit her when the farmhouse they lived in caught fire and Anna was in the hospital. Trudy has no choice but to admit her mother in a cheap care home. She is shocked at how her mother has aged in the very short time she had seen her last.
Anna is as quiet and taciturn as ever and does not answer her daughter for any questions asked. As she is clearing her mother’s house to take personal stuff over to Anna at the hospital, she searches for and comes across a picture of herself with Anna and an SS German officer – a young Anna and a kid Trudy.
Anna’s story meanwhile continues. She take sanctuary with a baker called Mathilde and is now very pregnant. She refuses to leave the city, still trying to see if there is any word possible from Max.
Anna suddenly turns into a brat, seemingly pushing to help against Marthe’s will. It is meant to show her determination but it comes across as ungrateful brattiness. In anger at not being allowed to do what she wants, she throws bread dough on top of Mathilde. But they seem to have developed a mother daughter kind of relationship. She begets a daughter Trudy whom Mathilde adores.
But one day Mathilde goes out to deliver some food and never comes back. Anna goes to see what happened to her and sees that she has been shot and killed by the SS for wandering while there was a curfew.
In the present time, Trudy convinces a fellow professor to include the German point of view too in an essay she is preparing about the Nazi rule and Trudy volunteers to coordinate it. When she gets a phone call in response to her advertisement to see a German woman living in poverty in America, she interviews her with a cameraman recording the interview. The interview is extremely shocking with the woman’s flat denial of any mass extermination of Jews and also her overtly anti Semitic attitude towards the victims.
Back in time, Anna is visited by a high ranking SS officer who tries to find out how much Anna knew of the traitorous activities of Frau Kluge, the baker. The latter was executed because they discovered her aid to the Jewish prisoners by providing illegal food and also arms (which Anna helped load)
Anna pretends ignorance and shock. But the Obersturmfuhrer is now interested in Anna’s pretty body. After he has his way with him, he promises to come every week to ‘take inventory’ at the shop. Anna has no option other than to agree.
He visits regularly. He brings little presents for Trudy and Anna but more than that, he brings real cow’s milk which she can feed Trudy. He fantasizes and enacts all kind of sexual scenarios with a compliant Anna.
Once Anna went to provide bread to the prisoners (the way Mathilde used to) and nearly got caught as when she returned, she found an irate Obrstrumfuhrer waiting angrily for her, demanding to know where she has been. With difficulty, she made him believe that Trudy was sick and she had gone to see a doctor but knows that henceforth, her days of supplying bread to the prisoners is over.
He always talks after sex; mostly she does not even pay attention but does when he mentions, after an absence of two weeks, that he visited Auschwitz.
Meanwhile we realize that Anna was married to a Scandinavian called Roger but they divorced due to total mental incompatibility. Roger has now married to Kimberly, a blond girl. Even a casual visit ends up in a fight that angers her terribly.
As a good dual timeline book should, this one slowly expands the background so that you get to see more and more of their life and so get slowly pulled into the story. Interesting technique. It works well in this book.
But when the present timeline comes, it gets stuck a little bit with Anna’s stubborn behaviour and Trudy’s annoyance. But the interviews are interesting, especially the one where she goes to meet a retired teacher called Goldman who reads out an explosive prepared statement – he is a Jew who answered her advertisement pretending to be a German – and angrily orders them out of his house! She goes back to make peace with him. They slowly develop a closeness and Rainer Goldman becomes Anna’s trusted friend and more in the days that follow.
The past is also brutal, with descriptions of Anna being used by Horst (yes that is the Oberstrumfuhrer’s name) as he wills and also showing some surprising gestures of caring. All this in the backdrop of several reverses for Germany at the hands of both the Americans and Russians, who relentlessly advance.
Finally he comes to say that he is fleeing and asks Anna to join him, but without Trudie. She refuses and sends him away.
The book goes on to talk about the subsequent American takeover at the end of the World War and the townfolk’s attempt to label her as a Nazi sympathizer. It also talks about her subsequent (and the only) marriage and emigration.
In the present timeline a lot happens too. The only thing Trudy remembers from her childhood is the Obstrumfuhrer and her mom and so she is convinced that she is the son of an SS Nazi officer – illegitimate to boot. To her pointed and desperate questions, Anna refuses to give any details.
So she runs to Rainer, who takes her into his heart and to his bed. She is truly happy but when she broaches the subject to Ruth, her professor friend, she is concerned and tries to dissuade Trudy. Trudy gets angry but then when she goes to Rainer’s house, she finds him packing to go to Florida forever. She pleads with him to not do that, but he says that this is how it must be. She guesses there is a terrible secret about Rainer that no one is willing to tell her.
In the meanwhile the last interview with a German happens to be with a businessman with less than normal morals and scruples and Trudy learns of the Special Delivery (done by Mathilde and Anna of course)
A very potent story, with things happening in both timelines. A very satisfying read. Generally, with enough true stories about the Holocaust (Schildler’s List being an example) you don’t generally want to read fiction about the same subject – or at least I did not want to. But do read this one. The story, plotting, narration are all top class! You will be rewarded for the effort.
9/10
— Krishna