“The Children’s Blizzard” by Melanie Benjamin is set during the massive upper Plains “Children’s Blizzard” of 1888, which killed 235 people. It got its name from the many schoolchildren who were either trapped in their one-room schoolhouses or perished on their way home. This novel focuses on two schools whose teachers make different decisions on that day. The two teachers are first generation Norwegian-Americans. Gerda, in Dakota Territory, dismisses her students to go home so she can be with her beau. Raina, in northern Nebraska, keeps her children at school.
The blurred lines between good and evil, the desperate decisions forced on people by World War II, and survivor’s guilt are themes of “Those Who Are Saved” by Alexia Landau. Vera and Max are a Russian Jewish family living in France at the outbreak of the war, having fled the Bolshevik Revolution in World War I. After the fall of France, the Vichy government orders them to internment camps. They arrange to leave their four-year-old daughter Lucie with her governess. Later, when Vera and a friend escape and arrange the release of their husbands, Vera is unable to locate Lucie quickly enough and they escape the country without her. Settling with other creative, artistic emigres in Hollywood, they are tortured by not knowing the fate of their daughter. At the war’s end Vera returns to France to try to find Lucie.
Also set during World War II, but quite different in that it’s a biographical novel, is “The Invisible Woman” by Erika Robuck. Last year I read “A Woman of No Importance,” a nonfiction account of the amazing exploits of American Virginia Hall as a spy in France during the war. Robuck now writes a fictionalized account of Hall centering on her return to France in the spring of 1944, when she successfully organized and armed a resistance group in France ahead of D-Day. Two years earlier, Hall had run the Lyon network but escaped when it was betrayed, a story told in flashbacks. Since then she had been one of the Nazis’ most wanted persons, known to the Germans, due to her prosthetic leg, only as “The Limping Lady.”
The nonfiction book is “The Ratline” by Phillippe Sands. The core of the book is the story of Otto Wachter, the Nazi governor of the Polish province of Galicia during World War II. Like so many others, Wachter used the “ratline” to escape to Peron’s Argentina and live there with impunity. In Wachter’s case, he died mysteriously on a trip to Rome in 1949, that death also forming an important part of this tale. That’s too narrow of a characterization, as the book also ranges over topics such as the burdens that weigh on the descendants of both Nazis and their victims, the dismaying ties between the Allied victors and captured Nazis from whom they might benefit, and more.
