In January I travelled to Germany in search of the places Hans and Sophie Scholl had lived and studied. They were arrested, tried and executed for their part in the anti-Nazi White Rose resistance group that was active in Germany in 1942-43.
The White Rose was a resistance movement founded by a group of student medics in Munich during the Second World War. Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst and Willi Graf were all united in their opposition to the Nazi regime. They were a minority who dared to speak out against Hitler and the Nazi Party. Their resistance took the form of pamphlets – sometimes quite intellectual – in which they sought to convince people of the injustices of the Nazis and the duty of all Germans to oppose Hitler. Sophie Scholl, Hans’s younger sister, joined her brother in Munich in 1942 and soon became a committed member of the White Rose. Tragically, they all paid the ultimate price for their bravery.Continue Reading
I might as well say straightaway that my Book of Year is Das Achte Leben by Nino Haratischwili. It won hands down. There were other great books, but this one stole my heart. And much of my time! It’s incredibly long, but divided into parts, so you can read it in sections, a bit like a series. But it isn’t a series, it’s a single novel following the fortunes and (more often) the misfortunes of a Georgian family throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century. It was recommended to me by a friend when I asked her for a good book in German. I read it in the original German, but it has been translated into English as The Eighth Life. Despite the vividly portrayed horrors of living in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the story is narrated by Niza with a lightness of touch that makes the book very readable. It’s harrowing but also warm-hearted, gripping, and occasionally funny. It deserves to become a classic.
A Long Way From Warsaw is a novel that tells the story of Poland in World War II through the eyes and experiences of the fictional Nowak family living in Warsaw. I’m interested in the way that ordinary people are forced into extraordinary circumstances when confronted with traumatic events, such as war. Although the family in my story is fictional, what happens to them happened to many such people in Poland during this turbulent time.