You wonder if prisoners at Ravensbruck or Auschwitz might have thought things had taken a turn for the better for them when they first caught sight of female guard Irma Grese, who was later remembered by a female inmate doctor as “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
And certainly if you study pictures of her in which she looks more girlish than monstrous, more simply defiant than truly awful, it’s hard to reconcile the images with the woman we're told carried a whip and pistol and shot prisoners in cold blood, beat some women to death and whipped others mercilessly with a plaited whip, let loose upon prisoners half-starved dogs, selected prisoners for the gas chambers and went unrepentantly to the gallows when she was hanged by the British at age 22.
“The hyena of Auschwitz,” Grese was called, as close to a real-life monster as any of us is likely to imagine, and yet she’s a hero to Sigrun, the young East German girl who’s the titular character of Bernard Schlink’s novel, “The Granddaughter,” in which the girl spends time with her West German grandfather, who’s appalled by sentiments from her such as, “We don’t need people like that,” about the “Africans and Mussulmen” who ran a kebab stall that was torched in her East German community.
Fully understandable, though, her sentiments, given how she was raised in a household where there was a photograph of Rudolf Hess above a kitchen sideboard and her father insisted that Hess was a martyr for Germany and peace and was “murdered” at Spandau Prison.
Little wonder, then, as I say, that she holds the attitudes that she does, waxing exuberantly about the sentiment, “my honor is loyalty,” which the grandfather reflects was the motto of the SS, and how she thinks that the books in his bookshop, including “The Diary of Anne Frank,” are full of lies about the Reich, insisting “Hitler didn’t want the war, he wanted peace. And the Germans didn’t murder the Jews.” And when he tries to refute her, noting that the books are based on the records of the German government and eyewitness statements from the concentration camps, she responds with, “they’re lying about Auschwitz. People can’t be gassed with Zyklon B, or at least not as many and not as fast as they claim they were in Auschwitz. Papa says that’s not politics, that’s chemistry."
A true believer, in short, her father, and while her mother isn’t as hard-core a devotee of Nazism, she’s nevertheless confrontational with the grandfather, wanting to know what he’s up to, if he’s trying to “save our souls.”
“Sigrun belongs to Germany,” she says, and “I will not allow you to take her away from it.”
No easy proposition, then, for the grandfather to instill in the girl a more humanistic viewpoint, yet over time the two do come to forge a bond in a book which, with its recollection of a ghastly time whose horrors are still denied by some today, is especially timely now for Americans rent by an election whose aftermath has already seen Reich-like incidents including texts going out to blacks to report to the plantation and a play about Anne Frank being disrupted by pro-Nazis.

I found this to be very transportive - not only was the story beautiful but the prose seemed to also convey the mood and the stoic nature of that time and place. Most books are not successful on both levels. I also appreciate the subtle ways it reminds us of a time of history we can never allow ourselves to forget without being set in the time of the war itself. Thank you for the chance to read this!

This book disappointed me. I read The Reader many years ago and I loved it. But, at the time, I was just home from a semester in Poland where I was up to my eyeballs in all things Holocaust and WWII aftermath. So, twenty-plus years later, my hopes for this book were perhaps too high. Maybe the translation was awkward. I couldn't get attached to the characters and the escape from East Berlin to West seemed too easy for me.

This was a very interesting read, but it was hard to connect or relate to. It was still very entertaining and it did keep me engaged in this book, and it was a quick read. I liked the pacing, and the way it was written. I liked the characters and the development of them.


Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for an honest review!!