Auslander by Paul Dowswell

Young Piotr Bruck shivers as he waits naked in a draughty corridor to be examined by two men in white coats with curious instruments. The year is 1941, the place Warsaw and Piotr is an orphan and outcast, not Polack but Volksdeutscher: a Pole of German ancestry. The queue of boys is split into two and Piotr prays not to be sent to the right, to the covered army truck visible through the open doorway. He does not know the meaning of the truck but senses it cannot be good. Instead his blond hair and Nordic looks mean that the Race and Settlement programme choose him to be returned to the heart of Nazi Germany and placed with a good Nazi family in Berlin. Kaltenbach is a doctor conducting experiments for the Reich, with a wife and three children. Piotr is renamed Peter and tries to adapt, but is still treated as an Auslander: a foreigner. 

Peter finds a friend in neighbour Anna Reiter and her family, German but not Nazi. The evidence of his eyes and his friendship with the Reiters opens Peter's eyes to the true nature of the Third Reich and the Nazis. As the net of a brutal regime that brooks no resistance closes in around him Dowswell's book quickly becomes a thriller and Peter and Anna are in a race against time.

Excellently written, compelling and as enlightening about the Nazi regime as Anne Frank. A fantastic book for older children about a period of history that must not be forgotten.

Annexed by Sharon Dogar

Dogar imagines life within the hidden flat that housed Anne Frank and her family from the point of view from the boy she fell in love with, Peter van Pels. Dogan works with the fact that a diary is a subjective piece of writing, and that Anne Frank was a young teenager, and constructs a narrative that is very interesting but without the compelling power of Frank's own diary Kitty. When we read Frank's diary we read the actual words of a very ordinary young girl destined to die in the Bergen-Belsen death camp, to be survived only by her father and her words which would ring out as an appeal against race hatred and mass killings throughout the years since. I think Dogar's book is best when she is imagining Peter's experiences in Auschwitz and the final death march to Mauthausen, and the title is clever too as the Nazi's systematically annexed Europe 'cleansing' it of 'undesirables' as they went.

DYSTOPIA #4
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

 What if history had run on different tracks?  What if Roosevelt had been assasinated and not led the USA into World War II, what if the North Africa campaign had failed and Rommel succeeded, Stalingrad never happened and the Nazis taken over Europe.  What if Japan had prevailed at Pearl Harbour, the United States fleet destroyed, Japan never made to suffer the atomic bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima?  If Italy had never switched allegiance from Axis to Allies, and instead become a minor ruler in a world split between the might of two empires: Japan and the triumphant Third Reich.  If the USA was partitioned, the Rockies acting as a DMZ between Japan's reticent Buddhist non-violent society on the western seaboard and Germany's agressive Nazism complete with work camps and gas ovens to the East.  Dick imagined this, and the result is an extraordinary mediation on American society and the fragility of history.

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson - graphic novel

This is quite interesting and the graphics are great, I love the use of a very limited palatte of black, white and red. However, the story is a little predictable and the oncoming horror not as acute as it could be because the people dying are Death's Head Nazis who it is clear deserve everything coming to them.

On Hitler's Mountain: My Nazi Childhood by Irmgard Hunt

AZ: "Irmgard Hunt was born in Nazi Germany and brought up in the Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, just outside the fence that surrounded Hitler's alpine retreat. At the age of three, she was photographed sitting on the Fuhrer's knee - one of her parents' proudest moments. Irmgard grew up innocently accepting the Nazi doctrine, believing the lies of her teachers and joyfully singing anthems to National Socialism. In simple, powerful prose Hunt reveals the creeping Nazification of Germany and shows how ordinary people were seduced - and cowed - by the campaigns set in train by their leaders."

I got this for S as we visited the Eagle's Nest and Berchtesgarten I was interested in this book. An amazing story about growing up in Nazi Bavaria, a traditional life which differs not that greatly from alpine Austrian life today, and the indocrinations, food shortages and final defeats of WWII. To me, as important a chronicle as Carrie's War and The Diary of Anne Frank, and I felt brought an understanding of why Nazism flourished better than The Reader

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

AZ: "Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: what should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?"

A book group read, and a good fascinating one, although it only really came alive in the second half. Makes us ask ourselves hard questions about what we would have done in Hanna's situation. About it part the effects of the Holocaust on the next generation and in part about the sexual awakening of a 15 year old boy, about levels of responsibility and absolution. And, in a way, about the power of reading and redemptive power of words.

Sisterland by Linda Newberry

AZ: "Hilly's German grandmother, HeidiGran, comes to live with her family after she gets Alzheimer's disease; but as her mind becomes more muddled, secrets buried in her past start to emerge. Why does HeidiGran keep talking about a girl called Rachel? And why does she make racist remarks about Hilly's friend, Reuben? As Hilly struggles to cope with revelations about her family's past, she encounters racism and prejudice for herself when a friend becomes the victim of a mindless attack; she also falls in love for the first time."

Have read a couple of books by Newberry and found them intellgent explorations of mid to late teen life. Sisterland is the book I would like Cj to learn about the Holocaust through almost as much as The Diary of Anne Frank. The grandmother of the main character appears to be the only survivor of a German family but as Heidigran's Alzheimer's takes hold she reveals more and more of her past by acting as if she is there again. A book that links the Holocaust and resulting diaspora and the current issues of Israel and Palenstine with sensitivity and never allowing lapse into stereotypes, via racism and anti-Muslim feeling in the UK.

The Element of Water by Stevie Davies

AZ: "In pre-war Germany, two boys grow up together inseparable. However, as adulthood approaches and Nazism continues its inexorable march, Dahl and Quantz can no longer reconcile their childhood friendship as one becomes an SS officer and the other a pawn in the intelligence unit. Thirteen years later, their children meet: a woman and a man exposed to the sins of their fathers."

Found this a very long read. Interesting enough story, about the daughter of an Aryan Nazi deathshead and son of another solider forming a relationship after the war in a former SS hq but just lacked pace and interest for me. Didn't really sympathise with either character and felt there may be better books on the legacy of the war.