The Lilac Girls

Another book that was suggested to my community book club which wasn't selected was Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly. Similar to LaRose, it's another book that begs to be discussed but for many in the book club, I think it would be too much of "the same." We probably haven't read a Holocaust book in a long while, and this book, told from three different perspectives, differs from many other books we've read in the past. But this book would not have been a good fit for our book club at this time.

Lilac Girls tells its Holocaust tale from the perspectives of New York City socialite, Caroline, Polish political prisoner, Kasia, and  German doctor, Herta, a loyal Nazi whose dedication to the party quickly overtakes the Hippocratic Oath. Lilac Girls is based on the true story of  women whose lives were somehow connected thru experiences at the only women's concentration camp, Ravensbruck, during World War II.

Kasia's story, as a prisoner, was most grizzly and probably the type of story that readers to Holocaust novels are most familiar with. Kasia had become part of a teen underground in Lublin, Poland, in the early years of the war and when she gets arrested, her sister and mother get caught up and sent to Ravensbruck along with her.

Herta's story was less familiar and because of that much more disturbing. Herta was upset by Hitler's forbidding women from being surgeons. She applies for a job at Ravensbruck, which she understands to be a "reeducation camp for women, 90 km north of Berlin, near the resort town of Furstenberg on Lake Schwedt." On her first day, she is instructed to lethally inject an elderly prisoner. Her initial reaction was to flee. But her desire to be a surgeon quickly wins over, she stays and transforms into a monstrous part of the Nazi party machine.

I'd read about "medical experimentation" on Jewish concentration camp victims. This novel went into much more detail regarding what was involved with the particular non-Jewish group of women prisoners at Ravensbruck. The experimentation subjects became known as the Ravensbruck Rabbits. The novel says that's due to the women "hopping around the camp" after surgery and because they were the camp guinea pigs. In my mind, it was solely the latter.

The Ravensbruck Rabbits was an actual group of women. Herta Oberheuser was an actual doctor. And Caroline Ferriday was an actual socialite who wanted to make sure that the story of the Ravensbruck Rabbits was told.

Herta's story begs one to wonder just how quickly and easily the transformation from one who wants to save lives to one who is okay with ending innocent lives can happen. No matter how many books I read, I will never understand.

Caroline's story had a component of a "forbidden love" story, full of the soap opera miscommunications and missed opportunities. And as I was reading, I wondered how her story was going to intersect the stories of Kasia and Herta. Caroline's story also brought me back to wondering about what my young mother knew about what was going on in Europe during the 1940s.

I can't say I enjoyed reading this book. Impossible to enjoy. And thinking about what I was reading contributed to one night of very poor sleep. However, it certainly told a different story from two points of view that I was less familiar with. It is because of the different point of view that I am able to recommend Lilac Girls with reservations to anyone who is a frequent reader of Holocaust historical fiction.