The book is published with not only a declaration that it is a novel, but with a much more explicit declaration on the page with publication details, to the effect that every name and event and detail in the book is a fiction and has no similarity to anything in life or fact - which parodies all such declarations so hugely, so without any shred of either subtlety to the parody or likelihood to any shred of truth left possible in the declaration itself, that one begins to wonder just how factual the story is after all. The author is mentioned as born along with his twin brother in Vienna in '46, just as the ending chapter describes the twins born to the protagonist, and one has to wonder, is the story after all a collage of true stories of survivors of the Holocaust, and not just a story woven to incorporate the various details of the era, of the war in Spain and then occupation of Poland by Germany and Soviet Russia in turns, and the war crimes and the various people who lived in that turmoil?
Rosenberg offers an astonishing amount of detail of those events in so short a book that is after all a story of survival of two people in mostly very separate places, and a good deal of what can only be his own conclusions of philosophy and life from reading various philosophies he mentions and having learned of the events and details of the era. His conclusions and his thinking about it all, though, is so nihilistic, one wonders if it is due to the same reason it is of many Germans who have understood the era and the failure of every philosophy given them, by church and by nazis subsequently, until Germany was left alone ashamed while those that propounded the philosophies were unscathed, whether escaped or still power through the world.
The book is very gripping, difficult to put down, as it tells of a young Rita Feuherstal who searched her self as a young student and insisted on being sent to school, then to faculty of law for studies at Krakow university, at the beginning of it all, and how she lived through the war years and escaped from place to place, from Karpatyn where she lived with her little son Stephan and her husband, Doctor Urs Guildenstern, to the ghetto after the husband had joined medical corps services in Russia and her region was occupied by Germany, and further.
Rita was persuaded by her friends in the ghetto to allow her son to be saved by their contacts, which results in an uncertainty and anguish since the whole time and region is uncertain about anyone's survival, and she keeps on searching for him in midst of her flights from one place to another, always returning to places dangerous for her own survival for sake of trying to find him. She meanwhile is fleeing the persecution and certain death, via new identity and temporary shelters provided by helping volunteers, from Karpatyn to Warsaw to Krakow to Heidelberg and back to Poland under Russian occupation post war to look for her son. She works in various places, meets various people, and the story takes us across a whole spectrum of variety of people in their beliefs and behaviours, their nationalities and their actions during the time.
The author manages to bring in a lot of lesser known atrocities, such as the extortion gangs operating during the German occupation of Warsaw, including a few Jewish gangs; the extermination of Polish officers by Soviet military under orders; the deportation of Crimean Tartars and others to places east such as Kazakhastan; and more. The sheer detail of how much he gives in terms of events and people is overwhelming, even before he expounds the philosophy of it all being diseases in process of evolution of life.
So people who fought one occupying regime, such as Home Army, often found themselves being hunted as fascists by occupying Soviets, for example; and while the volunteer who helped her to secure her son was of this resistance group in Poland, the general membership of the group was just as antisemitic as general public of Poland even before nazis were in power, in fact almost as soon as Poland was a nation post WWI. That Heidelberg was the most virulent in antisemitism amongst the German universities isn't advertised for tourists who are shown a pretty picture of the castle and river, now, and told it is a respectable university, is perhaps not a surprise - and one owes to the author for bringing it out.
Then there are the mussnazi, the Germans in various posts of good standing who joined and spout for survival but don't quite subscribe to the nazi thinking and aren't very antisemitic at that. And the strident lesser Germans who want to get the Jews sent east even as their superiors caution them about Allies being at the border, or even in town, and to change their thinking since the regime has lost, which the lesser ones won't accept so easily - they have nothing to sustain them post nazi era of hating various victims of the time, and snatching everything that belonged to those that were sent off to extermination camps. The other main character, Rita's paramour who also acquires another identity and survives in very different, very far away places from her until they meet again, giving the author a chance to describe those people and places in that era - Spain, Russia.
But the slightly unacceptable and at any rate shocking bit is when Rita decides, having seen her sone alive after all with the woman from Home Army who had managed to save him, to not tell anyone, in the interest of saving not only the son from trauma a second time but the woman who had saved him. One would think bonds of blood and the years of having agonised for him, having gone into all sorts of danger to chance finding him, would at least allow her to tell the adults in question, even if not immediately demanding custody. Surely they could have worked out a solution whereby everyone would be together, in harmony?
What the book did not need, except probably forced by the publishers as de rigeur for last few years, is the physical details of intimacy of various characters. If the story was were published as a true story rather than as a novel, it could have been avoided!
