Rainy Day Reads

This is a piece of historical fiction set against the background of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff,   a ship carrying over 10,000 refugees, wounded soldiers and crew. The ship set out from Gotenhafen, now known as Gdynia, in present-day Poland at the end of January 1945. At the time the city was under German control and it was used as a naval base. At the end of the war it became a corralling point for refugees trying to escape the advancing Russian army and gain passage on a ship to safety.   In this story we follow four young people, each with their own motives and secrets. We have Alfred, the young German soldier, who believes in Hitler’s cause insofar as it doesn’t interrupt his plans for himself, Florian the Prussian who is enacting a scheme of revenge, Joana, a young Lithuanian woman who feels guilty for the people lost to the war and Emilia, a Polish girl who has gotten lost in the mire of war.  The four of them meet up on the road to Gotenhaf...

I saw this book making its way around Booktube and there was nothing but rave reviews, and the story line sounded really interesting, so I decided to pick it up.  The story follows a young girl from Lithuania. She and her family are arrested and deported by the Soviets along with a number of other people from all over the country in 1941. We follow their journey to the forced labour camps and their struggle to survive the cruelty of the Soviets.  I must say I have mixed feelings about this book. The first part very much reminded me about every story I’ve ever read about the deportation of Jews to the concentration camps during World War II, and while that story is extremely important to tell, I started to wonder if this book was going to bring anything new to the table. In the end I think it did. The story is so similar to that of the Jewish deportations, that it’s hard to remember that it’s actually something different. If you changed  the NKVD (Soviet pol...