[tw: Nazis, the Holocaust, ableism]

Okay so you may or may not be aware that a Christian Inspirational romance about a Jewish woman and a Nazi concentration camp commandant [link goes to the Smart Bitches review, NOT Amazon, because DON’T BUY IT] was a finalist in two RITA categories this year. (The RITAs are like, the romance version of the Oscars, basically.)

The BFF bravely waded through the MANY 5-star Goodreads reviews for this book and compiled some highlights for me which I want to share with you. I tried to keep the commentary to a minimum but sometimes I couldn’t help myself.

“Due to the fact that Stella has suffered so long in a camp she has to wear a wig of red hair to hide the baldness of her head from being shaved, she is impossibly thin and gaunt and the author painted a perfect picture of that aspect. And it was interesting to watch her transformation from starving survivor to a beautiful woman, wanted and adored. I liked Aric, I enjoyed the inner struggle of everything, he wasn’t exactly a nazi he was a german completing orders he hated because that is what he was trained to do…I firmly believe that even though all the evil that was going on there were still good germans who fought for Germany and not for Hitler.”

this is literally what a Nazi is

(the BFF’s commentary: “it’s so tragic to them that these upstanding clean cut nice blond boys were THROUGH NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN EVER brought into this tragic situation. let me shed a tear for these poor nazi officers. they didn’t want their life to be like this.”)

[blargh I ended up writing a big paragraph here about the banality of evil, but in the end I deleted it because look YOU KNOW PROBABLY. And I think these reviews speak for themselves.]

Aric is an Austrian who has had a difficult life. Stella is a Jew who is living a difficult life. Together they find that barriers between the Nazis and Jews can be torn down and they can coexist, after all, they are both human. 

It then develops that Aric is Not Your Average Nazi because he…is nice to disabled people.

What she knows for sure is that Colonel Schmidt defies categorization. He’s a Nazi Kommandant, yet the people he chooses to gather around him are all cast-offs on one way or another. And he takes care of them. 

Joseph… the one-eared houseboy. Precocious and sweet, Joseph retains his innocence and faith. He is the first thing Stella allows herself to love in the Kommandant’s house, and for Stella he symbolizes the fate of all the children. 

Helen, the mute cook whose silent presence helps guide this household. She and Aric understand each other instinctively, and there is a strong loyalty between them. (Aric says that scent of Helen’s apfelstrudel could lead men into battle.) 

Sgt. Rand Grossman, Aric’s best friend and brother-in-arms. Rand is trusted implicitly, and he deserves that trust. He lost a hand in the war, but he never lost his honor or his heart. 

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Every time I read a book about this time period, I feel sickened that one person could convince people to commit genocide.

HAHAHAHA. Here is where I always bring up that only one or two ppl in my family made it to the camps because they were all murdered by their neighbors. Who’d been pogroming them regularly before that. So yeah the Holocaust was definitely the work of one man.

THEN it turned out THERE IS A FICTIONAL HAPPY ENDING where the hero leads everyone to safety?????

She portrays the horrors of the Holocaust without delving into the terrible details which are often hard to bare. Having taught and attended many workshops on the Holocaust, I was familiar with the farce of the Red Cross inspection of Therensienstadt. I made me sad that the realty could not have been the way the story portrayed it. 

Honestly, I wish that the events in this novel were true, instead of fiction. I don’t want to give away the end of the story, but I wish there had been an Aric von Schmidt leading a transit camp.

Unfortunately, the story is fictional. The great escape never occurred. The author shares the facts in the Afterword, making the story all the more tragic….My favorite part of the book is the verses that Stella finds in her mysteriously appearing Bible….[H]er memories of best friend Marta sharing the gospel will encourage the reader in his/her own encounters with those who need to know God’s love.

The takeaway is that you should DEFINITELY try to convert Jews I guess, in case your people ever attempts genocide against them it will really buoy them up in their time of need.

Did I mention it is apparently heavily implied that Stella/Hadassah will convert after the end of the book?

If you love Esther’s story in the Bible, if you love historical fiction, if you love romance, if you are intrigued by WWII, by the suffering the Jewish people endured, then you will LOVE this book…I love Stella’s struggle with Christianity, and her friends who have shared Jesus with her in the past. Jesus is stirring in her even when she wants to deny Him.

I liked how Stella began to read the Bible, even the New Testament, and then how she discovered the truth of love, forgiveness, and faith in God.

Also, you may not be able to understand this at the beginning of the book, but I loved Aric. I really did. Like, a lot. I have officially put him on my mental ‘favourite book guys’ that I would love to marry. ;)[…]I was glad that Hadassah/Stella opened up to the New Testament, and had that hope, as I know that most Jewish people did not read the NT. 

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With her blonde hair and blue eyes, she was told she would be safe because those physical characteristics were rare in the Jewish people, but she knew beauty could be a dangerous liability.

and in another review:

Stella was told her beauty would save her, her blonde hair and blue eyes being rare to her people

blonde hair and blue eyes=beauty, folks

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I’ve never considered the parallels between the treatment of Jewish people in the Bible book of Esther and their treatment during the Holocaust until I heard about this book.

…

(the BFF: “yes… jews being killed IS like jews being killed what a parallel wait until you find out about… all of history?”)

Lately some of the WWII-era books I’ve been reading have had likeable German characters, including this story. It’s not like I believed that Germans during WWII were all bad–I realize a country, even in wartime, has diversity. But many books paint Germans as one dimensional Nazis, perhaps because of how Nazis and by extension, Germans, have been written about in history. So I appreciate seeing the change in Aric throughout the course of the novel, and find it really interesting to consider. I have no idea how many German officers/soldiers helped Jews or other marginalized people during WWII but now I’m interested to research that.

So it was no stretch for me to immerse myself in a novel where God prompts a disillusioned Nazi to protect a beautiful woman prisoner and through her, changes that man’s heart. I’m sure in real life, God gave many such men a chance to repent and turn to Him. And what better way to touch the humanity within them than through the noble lives of the people they were oppressing?