Hello everyone!
I come bearing the gift of another blog post! And I swear, I won't even cry.
Or, I'll try not to.
See, a while ago I noted down the name 'Pam Jenoff' and the title 'The Kommandant's Girl', but never got the chance to do anything with that note until about ten days ago. At which point I got a copy of said book, and sat down to read it.
Of course I knew what I was getting myself into.
See, the thing with me is that I do my homework, and I research most of the books that I want to read, specifically if they're going to be about a period in recent history. In this case, it meant World War II and the occupation situation in Poland, which included but wasn't just limited to martial law and curfew.
So yes, I knew that whatever I was about to read would probably lead me down a dark road and I'd end up with streaming eyes and a runny nose.
I persevered, however, and although a lot of people do criticise it - which I can understand - I think It's a very good book.
The Kommandant's Girl tells the story of Jewish girl Emma during the time that the Germans rolled into Krakow and set up shop there. As a Jew, for her that meant that she was removed from her home and put in the ghetto that was established to keep the Jews separate from the remaining population (although initially she hadn't been taken, she joined her parents, regardless).
It's in the ghetto that she meets up with the Resistance, under the leadership of Alek and Marek; see, Emma is married to Jacob, but Jacob has been with the Resistance since the initial occupation, and no one must know since he's a valued member. But he also wants Emma out of the ghetto, which means that she is aided by the others to Krysia, Jacob's aunt, who takes her in, along with Lukasz, the child of a prominent and old Rabbi family whose father had been arrested, and mother shot.
At Krysia's, Emma is given a new identity - that of a German girl Anna, who is related to the older woman, and Lukasz is her brother. With her light colouring she can definitely pass as German, but that soon proves to be a curse rather than a blessing.
Krysia, as a prominent artist and once famed piano player, used to entertain guests of the high strata in society, and still continues to do so, only now the guests are mostly German.
And among them is Kommandant Georg Richwalder, the high-ranking Nazi, official who basically rules Krakow.
Despite every single real fact standing between the two (which Emma is aware of), sparks fly almost instantly the moment the Kommandant lays eyes on Emma, and he tells her that he is in need of an assistant who would basically keep his life in order.
Nobody is honestly fooled that he's doing it out of the goodness of his heart, least of all the readers.
BUT.
As she can't really afford to deny him, Emma - now Anna - goes to work and is tasked by the Resistance to steal some items for them, find certain things, gather information, that sort of thing. Basically, to get close enough to the Kommandant to use his own emotions against him, keeping him too busy to figure out what's actually going on.
It works. Kind of.
See, Emma and Jacob had only been married for a couple of weeks before war broke out, and prior to that their relationship hadn't been that long-lived, either. Now, she hasn't seen ehr husband for months, and probably won't again until the war goes one way or the other.
In contrast, the Kommandant is literally always there - attentive, gentle, intelligent, and more or less gentile, considering the role he wears as a mantle.
Can you see where I'm going with this?
If not, allow me to spell it for you: absence does not always make the heart grow fonder. But it can grow forgetful.
Emma doesn't forget Jacob - in fact, it nearly tears her appart, what she's doing - but she also can't bring herself to deny the fact that she is falling in love with the Kommandant, and she knows that's the most dangerous of all.
And when things go south for the Resistance - after a café bombing Alek is shot to death, and Marek flees, which leaves Jacob wounded and removed from fighting and the rest of them scattering - yet another problem hits Emma like a freighttrain: she's pregnant.
True, Jacob had stolen a night to spend with her, but there's just a tiny problem with that.
She's done the math. And the biology.
And she knows there's no way the child is her husband's. The baby's father is the Kommandant.
Now it's time to hightail it out of Krakow, preferably before he finds out, but here, Emma's mistrust and disconnect from her fellow worker in the Kommandant's office goes awry, as the other secretary tattles on her to the Kommandant himself.
An unmarried woman, pregnant, and working for the Nazis? Surely, it's an affair!
Well, it is, but since it IS the Kommandant we're talking about ...
Naturally, he wants to protect both 'Anna' and their unborn child, and promises to take her out of Krakow, to Austria. The heart of the German country, basically, which terrifies Emma to no end. On the other hand, however, as opposed to Jacob, the Kommandant tells her that, if she asks him, he'll leave the army, for her, and go with her.
This is a point to note, considering Jacob never honestly offered this, or ever said anything besides 'we will be together after this war was over', and it's an interesting contrast to the Kommandant, who seems more than willing to drop it all for a family.
This isn't to say either one of the men is right or wrong, but it DOES confuse Emma further.
She tries to run in the night - but unfortunately,she misjudges that a man the size and musculature of the Kommandant (who had survived the Great War and is at this point forty-five/six-ish) probably needs about two doses of sedatives usually used on horses (I'm quoting my sister here). He wakes up before she makes it to her destination (since she wanted to say goodbye to her father before leaving, which is touching, but in retrospect not the smartest thing to do) and finds her out past curfew.
Whether or not what he says is because he refuses to see the truth or because he wants things to be simple, he tells her that he understands why she's running away - and it's okay, he'll go with her.
Only, a marriage certificate gets in the way - Emma's.
It falls out of her pocket, because the silly girl hadn't destroyed it like her husband had asked, so the Kommandant learns a number of things: that Anna is actually Emma, that she's Jewish, and that she's already married.
Considering his past (he had been married to a half-Jewish girl who was six months pregnant with their first child when she shot herself after the Nazis came for her father who the Kommandant couldn't - or wouldn't - save) this is the last straw that breaks the camel's back, and here we see the broken man the Kommandant really is as he aims to shoot Emma for this treachery.
Luckily for Emma, she has staunch friends in the Resistance, and a girl, Marta, shoots the Kommandant first, but he DOES get a shot in before he falls.
And here it gets tricky - are we supposed to hate the Kommandant, or cry for him? Emma is confused, too, but he apologises to her, still calling her Anna as opposed to her real name, and dies of the wound in her arms.
Emma is forced to leave both his body and Marta behind - as the girl is too wounded to run - and make a dash to Krysia's place on her own. There, the SS officers have already set fire to the house, and unfortunately Krysia did not survive their last interrogation. Emma searches for - and finds - Lukasz, and together they escape into the woods, aiming for a farm where Jacob is waiting for them. Together, they would make for the border to Czechoslovakia.
And that's where we leave her.
In a way, the ending isn't as satisfactory as it COULD have been, considering we pretty much leave off as some of Emma's troubles are only just beginning, but we get some closure from the situation she had had to endure during her time as the Kommandant's lover and assistant. If you read the rest of the books in the series, you learn what happens to her after - but I'm not giving anything away in this post yet.
Suffice to say, I cried a lot during this book. My grandmother used to tell me tales of the war time when she was just a child, so I have a certain connection to it, and the horrors which happened during it.
In this particular story, I cried for Emma and the complex, emotional pattern her life was forced into, for the Kommandant who COULD have been a thoroughly good man if the wars had never happened, for all the lives lost that were never mentioned in this book but which actually happened.
Most of all, I simply cried over the atrocities that were committed, and which this book only mentions, incredibly briefly.
But they were there. And even if this book is labeled as romance, it is primarily historical fiction.
And as such, the history is all too real - and a lesson worth remembering.
xx
*image not mine
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