THE BOOK FAIR

Review:  2016

The novel offers a simplistic view of WW II and focuses on Germans as the victims.  The Germans murdered seven million civilians in Russia and an additional three million civilians in the USSR, during the invasion of Russia, “Operation Barbarossa.” German civilian losses totaled 500,000, during the Russian invasion of Germany, 400,000 of those, by Allied bombing.

The enemies of the Third Reich, the Allies, both Russian and Americans are depicted as evil, portrayed to commit terrible atrocities.  The bombing of Dresden is wholly lamented though the bombing of London, the atrocities committed by Germans in Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia are omitted while the genocidal War Against the Jews is summarily glossed over.

 

The story:  Elisabeth Hofmann resides in Schoeneberg, Germany in East Prussia with her four children, in 1944.  Elisabeth worries over her husband, Kurt, who is fighting for the Fatherland, on the Russian front.  Helga, Elisabeth’s teenaged housemaid, helps the well to do Elisabeth, manage her home and children.

One day, a starving and wounded, young man, enters Elisabeth’s home.  Helga decides to help him.  It is later realized that Jakob Gruenstein, who is Jewish, escaped from a concentration camp.  Elisabeth questions the veracity of Jakob’s story and he is referred to, as the Jewish escaped prisoner, for the remainder of the novel.

Elisabeth reveals her anti-Semitism as do other characters in the story, and admits she cared nothing for the Jews who were removed from her town.  Elisabeth recalls waving her Nazi flag in excitement when the Fuhrer (supreme leader) arrived to town. 

As the Russian army advances, crossing Poland into Germany, Elisabeth, Helga and the children move to different localities to escape.

 

NOTE:

Hitler seized power in 1933, after more than 10 years of planning and different attempts to snatch power from the government.  Hitler employed violence and murdered political opponents and associates when expedient, and stood accused of burning the Reichstag (the Parliament).  “Mein Kamph”, published in 1925 and 1926, fully disclosing Hitler’s plans, was written from jail after a failed political coup.

After the election in 1933, and Hitler’s self appointment as Fuhrer, Hitler initiated polices against Jews with the Nuremburg Laws.   Germans were neither ignorant nor innocent.  The German people were complicit.  Newsreels depict the seas of millions of German waving and saluting the Fuhrer.

No doubt Russian soldiers, having witnessed millions of German atrocities of civilians in their country, hungered for revenge.  However, no moral equivalency exits between the Axis and Allies.  Germans murdered 13 million Russian civilians and slaughtered 6 million Jews throughout Europe.

The German’s killed directly 40 million people, and millions more, died later of wounds, and war related injuries.

 

The age-old Christian myth that Jews participated in the Roman’s killing of Jesus, is the basis of all anti-Semitism.  Further, the monetary reparations Germany paid to Israel was only a fraction of the wealth Germany stole from European Jews.

 

The author, born and raised in Germany, immigrated to the U.S. in 1965 and is the baby, Barbara, in the novel.

 

The Nazi Party is not banned in Germany.