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Lilac Girls A Novel Martha Hall Kelly 9781101883075 Books

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Lilac Girls A Novel Martha Hall Kelly 9781101883075 Books

Caroline Ferraday comes from a rich family and has no need to work. However, she is a volunteer at the French consulate and is passionately dedicated to helping French refugees and especially raising money and clothing for French children without family or friends. For the Germans under Hitler are ravaging Europe and is now headed for France, causing many to attempt to flee to America. Caroline is about to become enamored with a married well-known actor, whose family will also become victims of Hitler’s aggressive policies.
The reader needs a very strong stomach for what follows. Kasia Kuzmerick wants to act like a grown-up and begins to accept low-level jobs for the Polish resistance. One admires her courage and tenacity and yet every move she makes seems to foreshadow eventual capture and imprisonment.
On the other hand, we meet a very young German doctor, Herta Oberheuser, whose training has been limited to dermatology since female doctors are almost unheard of in Germany. Desperate to use her knowledge and skills, especially as a surgeon, she signs up for government service and winds up in the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women. At first she is appalled at the horrors she witnesses and is expected to perform herself. Eventually she succumbs to cooperation because her own imprisonment is the only option left for refusing to obey orders. What is fascinating about this story is the fact that both women must do things they abhor in order to survive. The consequences of these choices, however, turn out quite different after the war eventually ends. Being a survivor isn’t always enough of an excuse.
These women are outstanding heroines in their fierce belief in hope, hope they will come out of their experiences whole somehow and hope that justice will prevail. Such an attitude is easy to blithely state when detached from intense suffering but indomitably brave when called to compromise or silently live in physical, mental and emotional agony.
Lilac Girls: A Novel is a novel every reader will never forget. That, after all, is the purpose of recounting the realities of WWII and the Holocaust, including those non-Jews who bore the ferocious, tyrannical policies of Hitler carried out by his henchmen and women. As painful as the story described hits the reader, it is a starkly told tale that must be told, lest we forget! Highly recommended historical fiction!


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Lilac Girls A Novel Martha Hall Kelly 9781101883075 Books Reviews

Lilac Girls is one of the most moving Holocaust novels this reviewer has ever read. The story covers a twenty year period from 1939-1959. Kelly's exhaustive archival research, interviews of concentration camp survivors and visits to sites in the US, Poland, Germany and France make her work more one of fact than of fiction. At first the reader meets Caroline Ferriday, who really lived as a socialite, Broadway actress, charity worker and volunteer at the NY French consulate. Then, there are the Polish Kusmerick sisters, based on real sisters from Lublin, who were interred at the all women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück, Germany. There they and 72 other inmates were subjected to hedonistic and debilitating operations and injections performed by Nazi physicians. Many of these inmates could no longer walk erect, but were reduced to hopping for which they were dubbed "the Rabbits of Ravensbrück". They suffered and while some succomed, others survived to give testomony to their ordeal. Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, there is Herta Oberhauser, one of the real Nazi doctors who performs these "experimental procedures" on the inmates. After the war, Dr Oberhauser was captured, tried at the doctors' trial in Nuremburg and incarcerated. With great mastery, the author intertwines the lives of all of these female characters as though she were plaiting a neat braid in which the ends unite in a satisfying whole. These are charcters and expriences that resonate with the reader, long after the last page is read.
It has been a long time since I've read a novel this moving. The story alternates between three characters. Caroline Ferriday, socialite and former actress in New York, works at the French embassy as WWII starts. The book features a romance between her and a French actor, and this story weaves in and out, not seeming to connect until at last it does. However, you don't mind your time with Caroline, although she is not the most compelling figure.

By far, that would be Kasia, spunky Polish teenager, who wants to be part of fighting the Germans and is caught up in the Polish underground. Before long, her boyfriend, sister and mother are all arrested and sent to a women's concentration camp for "re-education", a place where Nazi doctors performed unsavory operations on human subjects. This story reminds us all of the horror of Nazi Germany, of the huge numbers of people they killed, of all nationalities and backgrounds, and of the madness that Hitler was able to convince so many people to believe. Kasia throughout the story is brave, tough, but not entirely unbroken.

Finally, the most gut-wrenching parts of the story involve Herta, a Nazi doctor that somehow convinces herself that she is doing the right thing, the patriotic thing. It was so sickening to read that sometimes I had to put the book down and look away, as much as Kasia's sections sucked me in and kept me turning pages. She's an anti-heroine, but it's still important to understand her story, and what drove her - and she is a key part of the total story that is told. Don't worry - she doesn't get away with it and you never truly sympathise with her.

The book was well-written and apparently well-researched judging by the notes. The author was a former journalist and that shows the mark of it, and yet, it reads as fiction even though many of the characters were real people of that time period.
Caroline Ferraday comes from a rich family and has no need to work. However, she is a volunteer at the French consulate and is passionately dedicated to helping French refugees and especially raising money and clothing for French children without family or friends. For the Germans under Hitler are ravaging Europe and is now headed for France, causing many to attempt to flee to America. Caroline is about to become enamored with a married well-known actor, whose family will also become victims of Hitler’s aggressive policies.
The reader needs a very strong stomach for what follows. Kasia Kuzmerick wants to act like a grown-up and begins to accept low-level jobs for the Polish resistance. One admires her courage and tenacity and yet every move she makes seems to foreshadow eventual capture and imprisonment.
On the other hand, we meet a very young German doctor, Herta Oberheuser, whose training has been limited to dermatology since female doctors are almost unheard of in Germany. Desperate to use her knowledge and skills, especially as a surgeon, she signs up for government service and winds up in the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women. At first she is appalled at the horrors she witnesses and is expected to perform herself. Eventually she succumbs to cooperation because her own imprisonment is the only option left for refusing to obey orders. What is fascinating about this story is the fact that both women must do things they abhor in order to survive. The consequences of these choices, however, turn out quite different after the war eventually ends. Being a survivor isn’t always enough of an excuse.
These women are outstanding heroines in their fierce belief in hope, hope they will come out of their experiences whole somehow and hope that justice will prevail. Such an attitude is easy to blithely state when detached from intense suffering but indomitably brave when called to compromise or silently live in physical, mental and emotional agony.
Lilac Girls A Novel is a novel every reader will never forget. That, after all, is the purpose of recounting the realities of WWII and the Holocaust, including those non-Jews who bore the ferocious, tyrannical policies of Hitler carried out by his henchmen and women. As painful as the story described hits the reader, it is a starkly told tale that must be told, lest we forget! Highly recommended historical fiction!