Reviewed by Emma Crowley
Sixteen-year-old Tasha Ancel turns to take one last look at the imposing place that stole her freedom and her childhood. She has no idea how she continued to live when so many others did not. For the first time in months, her heart beats with hope for her future and that of the smaller children who cling to her now.
Tasha was torn from her mother’s arms by an SS guard days before the gates of Auschwitz opened. Now she only has a lock of her mother’s fiery hair. Desperate to be reunited, Tasha asks everyone she meets if they’ve seen a woman with flame-red hair. But with so many people trying to locate their loved ones in the chaotic aftermath of war finding her feels like an impossible task.
Officially an orphan, Tasha is given the chance to start a new life in the Lake District in England. She knows her mother would want her to take the opportunity but she can’t bear the thought of leaving Poland without her.
Tasha must make a heartbreaking decision: will she stay in war-ravaged Europe and cling on to the hope that the person she loves most in the world is alive, or take a long journey across the sea towards an uncertain future?
Many thanks to Bookouture via NetGalley for my copy of The War Orphan to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.
The War Orphan is the third book in the Women of War series by Anna Stuart. It’s not at all necessary to have read the previous two books as there is only one line towards the start of this one which mentions characters that have already featured. The book opens with a brief prologue set in Auschwitz in January 1945 as the inmates are experiencing the last throws of Nazi violence. The Allies and the Russians are fast approaching, and the Nazi’s are abandoning ship as fast as they can, forcing the remaining adults that are fit to do so, on a march through the cold frozen landscape whilst the children are left behind. Tasha Ancel has been in the camp for several months and has lost her sister but herself and her mother Lydia have remained together and are determined they will see things through to the bitter end where freedom is hopefully within reach. ’They cannot put us down. Every knock, we get up again, every cut we heal, every bit of their hate, we fight with our love for one another.' That’s what shines through from this book, the depth and strength of the love that Lydia and Tasha have for each other and it never wavers no matter how difficult and stressful the situation becomes. Lydia is amongst those sent on the march. The mother daughter bond is torn in two but Lydia promises to meet Tasha but as to the place the words are lost amidst the wind as she is dragged away. So this sets the scene for the book the vast majority of which is set in the months following the conclusion of war.
The plot is told from three perspectives all of which are female. Tasha, Lydia and Alice all have distinct voices although Lydia to a lesser extent than the other two women. After liberation from Auschwitz, Tasha along with a young man named Georg find themselves in the Theresienstadt ghetto which has now been turned into a refugee camp. Tasha has no house or family and has no idea where her mother could be. That’s if she survived the march in such appalling and brutal conditions. Tasha has survived the most hideous oppression in modern history but at what cost? I felt that if Georg hadn’t been by her side and without his guts and his cheeky manner of getting things that others couldn’t than Tasha perhaps would have floundered and have wandered aimlessly throughout Europe looking for her mother. Georg was the push she needed to embrace the opportunity to take the journey to England as a war orphan as funded by the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief. Yes, in her mind the miles between herself and her mother were expanding even further but Georg knew they needed safety and security and once that was established Tasha could search for her mother through the relevant organisations.
Georg promised Tasha everything she could possibly want and yes sometimes he went way off track with his airy fairy ideas but he was certainly a trier and never rested on his laurels. You could see the love that developed between the pair but half the time I thought Tasha didn’t value Georg or what he was trying to achieve for them in the long term. She was so shrouded in misery, which I could understand too, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t treat people with the respect they deserve. As they arrive in England with a plane full of other orphans which include a children a mixture of all ages they are met by Alice Goldberger who works for Anna Freud. The Calgarth Estate on Lake Windemere is to be their home until they can be reunited with their parents or definitive news can be found out about relatives etc. I had known nothing about these orphans who came to Lake Windermere but the very detailed historical notes at the end of the book made me realise just what a significant event this was post war. The notes at the end of the book read like a book themselves and were fascinating and really added to my understanding of the entire plot and the themes being explored and the message the author was trying to convey.
Tasha was a character who I felt we were meant to have great sympathy for as we journey with her. I did to some extent but god at other times she was very frustrating and her abrupt and rude manner lead to her alienating people and I couldn’t fully warm to her. She was grumpy and quite negative and was very much stuck in the past. I believed she could have tried to move forward a bit whilst searching/waiting for news of her mother rather than remaining stagnant and having a dark and gloomy cloud around her. As she is so obsessed with her past she can’t see any way to make a future. She is battered, bruised, hurt and riddled with anxiety and Alice has to try and find a way to break her barriers. I make it seem like Tasha is all bad she’s not but just at times I wanted to give her a shake. She can be fierce and bold when she wants to be and she does wear her heart on her sleeve but yet she is not without her faults and needs to learn to let those people in who are trying desperately to help her.
Alice without doubt is the mother figure throughout the book. She is perceptive and intuitive and was ideal for the job she found herself in post war caring for the newly arrived orphans. She is Jewish but escaped from Germany when the Nazis rose to power but her brother, his wife and young daughter failed to do so and now with the conclusion of war their whereabouts are unknown. But Alice soldiers bravely on and devotes her time and energy into the children in her care. She is always fully conscious of the children’s welfare whereas I felt Oskar, the psychoanalyst, was more interested into the scientific aspects of everything. Yes, it would be interesting to study the affects of trauma on the children and how they can adapt to a new life but not without having some human and personal touches which Alice certainly had but Oscar was lacking in. This quote perfectly summed up Alice, ‘The kids were opening their own gates, all they did now was ensure they had the strength to wind the handles’.
It soon became evident that the children had such a callous acceptance of the things they had experienced and witnessed but Alice can see through every individual child and does her best to help them navigate these new and uncertain times. But at the same time, she is harbouring her own hurt and anxiety as to what could have happened to her family members. Alice was without doubt my favourite character as there was such a calm, caring and nurturing aura around her. She does her best to connect with Tasha and I think she viewed her as an extra special case initially but then she wanted to establish a deep and lasting connection with her as perhaps she saw similarities with her in some small way. I admired how Alice went that extra mile to try and find out about Lydia. As for Lydia, the chapters that were included from her viewpoint provided the reader with a well-rounded viewpoint and enabled me to understand more about the deep connection they shared with one another. They were heart breaking and emotional and as I read I just wanted a positive outcome for everyone involved.
The War Orphan proved to be a fascinating insight into life after the war for those who were displaced. Alice and Tasha were very much driven by guilt but for varying reasons. Overall, I enjoyed the book, it wasn’t my favourite in the series but I appreciated all the research that went into the telling of the story and I am glad to have discovered another aspect to the war that I had not previously heard of as so much attention is given to the war years and we tend to forget what life would have been like for those who made it through the horrors that war brought. Hope and love are two of the dominant emotions throughout the story and they are what made this a very good read.
No comments:
Post a Comment