All posts tagged World War II

This Light Between Us

By Brookelorren on 2 Comments
This Light Between Us cover

I recently had the opportunity to read an Advanced Review Copy of This Light Between Us (thank you Netgalley and Tor Teen!). It’s an important story, historically, which mainly focuses on a Japanese teenager, Alex, whose pen pal is a French Jew. I enjoyed it a lot.

Alex and Charley become pen pals when they’re young. They keep writing to each other as they get older and World War II approaches. Not everything is rosy. Alex and his family are put into Japanese internment camps, while Charley’s letters become more sporadic and her situation becomes more dire as well.

These characters drew me in. Charley is a girl full of life and excitement; Alex is a quiet boy who likes drawing cartoons. I wanted to find out what happens to them. Do they ever get to meet? This book draws you in and makes you want to read more.

I liked the settings in this book as well. Alex grows up in Bainbridge Island, which I’ve been to more than once (although not in the 1940s). The book takes you to Japanese concentration camps and through war-torn Europe (which I’ve also been to, yet not during a war). I didn’t have trouble picturing any of these places. The book does include some French and German in the book, and a very small amount of Japanese. Since I speak German, passable French, and a tiny bit of Japanese, I didn’t have trouble understanding it. I imagine that most people would be able to deduce some of the meaning from the context.

The following paragraph contains a minor spoiler. Not everybody in this book lives happily ever after. If you’re looking for a story that leaves you with joy and happy tears, this isn’t the one. However, it does have a realistic ending.

If you’re looking for a book that takes you into the head of someone in World War II, I highly recommend This Light Between Us. Not enough time has been spent in most history classes talking about the Japanese internment camps in World War II, which is a shame. This book does exaggerate a few historical details, but it does include many that were true (I sometimes look these things up and I love history).

Another book similar to This Light Between Us, where a large part of the story takes place during World War II in an internment camp, is The Last Year of the War (I linked to the review). Although this book is classified YA, this is a book that would also hold interest for adults that don’t often read YA as well (the main character is around 19-20 at the end of the story).

My Real Name is Hanna is Really Good

By Brookelorren on 2 Comments

My Real Name is Hanna is a really good book.  Last year I read quite a lot of 20th century books, including Defying Hitler; I also regularly attend a Russian meetup group.  When I had the opportunity to read a book about a Jewish Ukrainian girl during World War II in exchange for an honest review, I figured that I had to read it.  I was not disappointed.

At the beginning of the book, we meet Hanna and her family.  They are a observant Jewish family who won’t even light a fire on the Sabbath: they pay for their neighbor to light the fire for them.  She has a normal family, attends school with her best friend Leon, and lives a typical Ukrainian life.  Even through they sometimes have to pledge their loyalty to one government or another (first Stalin and the Soviet Union, then Germany), they still live decently.

Hanna and her family begin to hear rumors about things happening to other Jews in faraway places.  At first, they are insulated from these problems because they live in a rural area.  Eventually, Hanna’s family is affected by Hitler’s rules for Jews.  First, her family is asked to wear armbands marking them as Jews (her family rebels against this order).  Then, they are given fewer food rations than their non-Jewish neighbors.  They start hiding fleeing Jews in their barn.  Eventually, things get so bad that Hanna’s family, as well as Leon’s family, have to flee their homes and hide.

Throughout the remainder of this book, they struggle to survive while in hiding.  Their circumstances get progressively worse, and when it looks like the family won’t be able to make it, the Russians finally take over their town and they are able to return to society.

My Real Name is Hanna is a book that you won’t want to put down.  I wanted to know what would happen to their family next.  How would they find food?  Will Hanna and Leon become more than friends?  You grow to care about Hanna and her family as they go through these struggles.  Hanna is a likeable girl, and even though you know she is going to survive (Hanna is telling this story as an adult), you still want to root for her.

With everything that is going on in the world, books like My Real Name is Hanna are more important than ever.  If you read the news, there is a growing hatred for “otherness” in both the United States and in Europe.  This is not only a good book; it is also a reminder that tragedies like this could happen again if we don’t remain vigilant.

This book will be available on September 15th, but you can pre-order it now.

How Could I Forget? The Hiding Place

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment

I couple of days ago I put out my list of my favorite books that I read for the first time in 2016.  I didn’t have a list in front of me of all of the books that I had read for the year, and was just going off the top of my head with the things that stuck out to me (this year I need to keep a record of the books that I read).  There was on glaring omission to this book list: The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom.

I apologize for the omission, but it truly belongs up in one of the top three books that I read this year.  I just read it earlier in the year last year and didn’t remember it.  So I’ll review it now.

“Thank God for the fleas.”

Whenever something bad happens in life, and I still want to try to be thankful, this is now the phrase I use.  It has its origins in The Hiding Place; more on that later.  I posted that on Facebook earlier this year and my mom was wondering why I posted it.  No, we don’t have fleas in our house… but it reminds me to try to be thankful in all things.

German concentration camp in World War II.
While obviously not the place where Corrie and her sister stayed, this is an example of how conditions must have been like while she was in the concentration camp.

Corrie Ten Boom grew up in a modest family in the Netherlands before World War II.  The early part of this book describes her childhood, all the family members that lived with her, the love that got away, and how she helped out at her father’s watch shop, which was attached to their house.  It was a simple life where she was taught to honor and love God.

When World War II started, the Ten Boom family went through hardships like everybody else, but they were more fortunate than the Jewish people, who started to disappear.  Corrie and her family end up getting involved in an elaborate scheme where they hid Jews until they could be moved to a safer place.  A few of the Jews that she helped couldn’t be moved for one reason or another, and they lived with the Ten Boom family.  An architect built a space in their house where the extra guests in their house could be hidden.

This was a dangerous business, because if they were caught, they could be killed.  They had to hold drills where they had to hide all of the evidence of what they were doing as quickly as possible.

One day, they were caught, and the Ten Boom family was rounded up and sent to jail.  Some of her family members were released; eventually, it was just her and her sister, Betsy, who ended up in a concentration camp together.

What the two sisters had to go through was horrendous, but one of the most inspiring things about the book is how they kept their faith through all of this.  The Ten Boom sisters managed to smuggle a Bible into their sleeping quarters at the concentration camp; Corrie was disgusted by the fleas in the room, but her sister Betsy reminded her to be thankful for all things; even the fleas.  The two sisters began to hold Bible studies in the concentration camp; I’m sure that there are several people today who are in Heaven today because of those Bible studies.  Later, Corrie learned that the only reason why the Nazi soldiers wouldn’t enter their sleeping quarters, which allowed them to hold their Bible studies, was because of the flea infestation.  They didn’t want to go near the place and the fleas.  So today, when I feel like something bad has happened and I want to be thankful, I try to “thank God for the fleas.”

I find Corrie’s forgiveness after the war to be amazing as well.  Instead of becoming bitter and wanting revenge, she showed forgiveness to her former Nazi captors.  It’s easy, in times where everybody else is doing wrong, to go on the wrong track and partake in evil.  Yes, the Jews needed healing after the war, but so were the former Nazis that got involved in evil because they were just trying to survive.  Corrie showed forgiveness to them as well, which completely awed me.

The book was easy to read, and it was required reading for my kids last year, after I found the book on sale on Amazon.com.  It’s not a happy book (I cried at times), but it is a beautiful, inspiring book.  If you haven’t read it yet, please put it on your list of must-read books for the new year.