The Daughter's Tale by Armando Lucas Correa
There are a lot of stories out and about now set during World War II
and more and more so they are the stories of the innocents, the
civilians, the mothers, daughters, children and elderly. These are
the people that war happens to and somehow they have to find the
strength and fortitude to survive it all.
When I read Correa’s
The German Girl I said that I learned something I didn’t
know (there’s a lot I don’t know, of course) and that was that a
refugee ship was sent with close to a thousand refugees looking for
exile in Cuba. Cuba wouldn’t take them. Neither would the United
States or Canada. The refugees were sent back to Europe where people
were dispersed among countries at war.
That ship is in this
story, too, and this book is based on a true story. Julius and
Amanda Sternberg have two daughters to protect from the encroaching
Nazi power. Julius is a Jew and is taken prisoner. Amanda looks
Aryan and is for the time safe, given just a glance when confronted.
But Julius knows their children are not safe and while in prison he
arranges for the girls to take passage on the ship headed for Cuba
while Amanda is wait for them with the wife of a friend in the south
of France. But it is while she is putting her very young girls on
board the ship that she makes the decision to send just one of them.
Amanda and Lina, who
is just four, make their way to their refuge and hope to hide and
wait out the war. But once again, Amanda is caught and sent to a
camp and must make another choice.
This story is about
caring, strangers, choices, sacrifice, redemption, faith, hope,
courage. While using the story of a survivor to inspire this one the
author put a mirror up to our face and asks the questions of our own
courage, how far we would go, how much we could endure.
I love reading historical fiction and learning new things, some of the things are disheartening but none the less history. Thanks for the insight into this book.
ReplyDelete